


Dulce Bellum Inexpertis

by Tayine



Series: Renegade Restrike [3]
Category: G.I. Joe: Renegades
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Medical Trauma, Mild torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:49:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2800175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"War is sweet to the inexperienced". Scarlett has known this for some time, but it takes a brand new adversary for that lesson to really sink in. Sometimes battles aren't worth the violent deaths they cause. Scarlett is far from inexperienced. War is not sweet anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third work in the canon that I have created for pre- and post-show. The first two, in order, are At First and Reunited. If you haven't already, I would read those first, as I reference events from those stories.

It was past midnight when she stepped up onto the top landing of the stairs, coming out into the fourth floor hallway of the building where she lived when she was on leave. She adjusted the knapsack that was slung across one shoulder and walked to the final door on the left. Her small travel suitcase rolled behind her. It had been several weeks since she had been able to come back and spend the night in her little bachelorette pad in the heart of Washington, DC, but the key still slid into the lock with ease, and the door opened without a squeak.

She stepped into the dark kitchenette of the apartment and noticed it was cold in the room. She had enough time to see the yellow curtains rippling over the open window above the countertop before several sets of hands grabbed her throat, waist, and hips and dragged her backwards.

Scarlett wasted no breath in a scream. She planted her right foot where it had stepped behind her to counter the force of the drag and turned on those toes, using her right arm to break the grip on her throat. The handle of her suitcase fell to the floor with a crack, and her knapsack slipped off into the hands of the unknown assailants. This threw her off-balance and made her stumble; she managed to connect her fist with a shadowy face but also received a blow of her own, across her sharp jawline that rattled her senses.

She twisted away from the attackers deeper into the kitchenette, bumping against the back of a wooden dining chair and making it squeal across the linoleum. The apartment was still dark, but she could see the shapes of three men looming against the cheerful colors of her home. One of them reached out and slowly closed the front door behind him as the others advanced. Scarlett did not have a weapon. Her handgun was locked in its safe in her bedroom; her crossbow blaster was hanging in the armory at the Pit. She usually carried a small revolver in an ankle holster, but she had travelled through the civilian airports in Atlanta and DC after visiting her father for a few days before flying home. She hadn’t wanted to bother with declaration and security when it was just a short vacation. Now it seemed like such a pathetic mistake that she almost deserved this.

She held up her hands and forearms in a fighting stance, her gaze shifting between the front two of the men who were approaching. They were masked, wearing dark clothes, and stepping quietly towards her without speaking. She couldn’t get much of a read on any of them. Home invaders wouldn’t jump immediately into a fight if the homeowner came in; they would grab their loot and run. Cobra wouldn’t send people in masks to fight with their hands; they would use blasters or guns to assassinate, as they had tried before. This was strangely personal, but sent from a mysterious enemy.

The lead man lunged at her and she dodged it, ducking sideways but bringing her knee up into his face, her hands clawed into the material of his mask at the back of his head. His nose broke and squished deliciously against her kneecap. She turned her attention back to the two others in time to see their fists aimed for her head. She avoided one with a hair’s breadth, leaning past her center of gravity, feeling the wind of it pass her cheek, but the second blow came from the other side, burrowing into her side above her lowest ribs. She grunted and turned, feeling the injury scream, and managed to connect another fist against the eye orbit of the nearest man.

One arm wrapped around her neck and dragged her backwards again, trying to do what they had already attempted: getting her to the floor. Scarlett fell into the man’s chest, refusing to hit the floor, and tried to break the grip around her throat with one hand while directing an elbow into the face that blew hot breath into her hair. Then the two others came at her from the front, punching into her gut. She tightened her abdominals but still felt them, one after another until she slumped, fingers from both hands dug deep around the forearm encircling her neck so that she was still getting air and blood flow. Then the man’s other arm came around and went to complete the triangle hold, the move she knew would choke her out in seconds if he was good.

She took a deep breath and went for the second arm, finding his fingers on the back of her head with her own and yanking them down and out, twisting his arm impossibly so that he had to let go of her with both. He flailed and fell to her feet, his arm twisted in her hands, and she managed two or three great kicks to his chest and head before being barreled by the other two. They each grabbed one of her arms. Her legs were swept out from under her and she was deposited on her back without a chance to break her fall. She hit hard and gasped, now pinned by both of their weights combined.

They punched her face a few times, like they were just trying to beat her into submission but not so much that they wanted her dead. That was fine. She would fight to the death anyway. She could feel lacerations on her cheeks, nose, and lips, and blood trickling down her throat, but she could still fight.

Her abdomen curled. Her legs came up and wrapped around the torso of the man who kneeled more centrally above her and brought him backwards, her thighs squeezing. The other man received a nasty punch for his troubles, now that one of her arms was free, and he keeled sideways, off her other arm, so that when she swept up into a sitting position, he was beaten a few times by her bruised and bleeding knuckles while his compatriot was still struggling to free himself from her legs. Then she turned back to the other one, getting him a few times in the head and gut before releasing her legs and jumping back to her feet.

The man who had choked her was slow at getting up, but he did, raising his head to stare at her. Scarlett could feel his eyes. She didn’t have an escape plan. She didn’t see a way out except killing or incapacitating all of them.

“Okay, bitch. Have it your way,” said one of the other men as he stood and adjusted himself. It was the first words any of them had spoken. She was unnerved by the implications. What had been their original purpose? Had the plan switched on them now that she had fought? Who were they?

She could ask questions later. All three were back on their feet and looming towards her again. Her back was now to the open living area of the front room, the kitchen table between her and the attackers. Behind her stood a couch, an easy chair, and a television, plus the hallway that led to her bedroom. Her gun was in her bedroom. If she could barricade herself in there long enough to open the safe, she would have her weapon and her leverage. But she didn’t dare turn her back and run, knowing the three men could be on her in seconds, and in the tight squeeze of the hallway, she would have significantly less room to fight.

Scarlett looked around for a weapon, a tiny once-over that revealed nothing. The knives were in her kitchen drawers. She didn’t have time to reach for anything with three of them.

“Just come easy,” said a different man.

She almost laughed. Would criminals ever learn? Soldiers don’t ever do anything the easy way.

All three came at her again and she prepared for it, but at the last second she realized it was a feint, and only two of them came upon her, twisting her arms behind her back and holding her tight. The last man, the one she now pegged as the leader, stepped up slowly. She had managed to avoid one of the men but not the other and was now caught. Breaking their grips was getting harder and harder; her hands were streaked with slippery blood and her eyes were already starting to swell shut. Joints and muscles were stiffening, and was that wheezing sound coming from her? That couldn’t be right.

She wrested her left arm from the attacker’s grip and swung a wide arc at the last man, struggling underneath the strength of the two who flanked and held her. The last one caught her arm and bent his around her elbow joint. “On the floor,” he said. The men holding her bucked and jumped from her ferocious struggles but did not let go, and they managed to get her to her knees. The last man stroked her bare arm a few times with his fingertips, from the elbow to the wrist. She was in a T-shirt that she had loved. There was no getting out the bloodstains now.

“So you don’t get misinformed about who’s boss here,” he said, still stroking, standing over her, “I’m going to do something nasty. It’s going to be a message for you, so please do not take it personally.”

Scarlett finally used her voice, finally found her legendary arguing skills. “You’re not going to get far after this.”

“My dear, I’m not going anywhere. We’re going to wait right here.” He held up a small square object about the size of a credit card cut in half. In the dim light, it was hard to make out at first, until it wasn’t, and her stomach dropped and her skin got clammy.

The man was holding her Joe radio, the one they all carried wherever they went in the world. It doubled as a communicator, a GPS device, and an emergency beacon. There was one tiny button that, when pressed, would bring down the extent of GI Joe’s force wherever the signal went.

“You… want the Joes?” she rasped.

“No. I just want one.”

Her mind whirled. The adrenaline in her system was wearing off. She was getting cold and tired, and yet she could still think. She would always have her mind.

“Now, first things first,” he said. With one movement, he dislocated her shoulder. Her vicious scream was muffled by the men covering her mouth, and she hated that she even cried out at all, but damn it, it was her first dislocation and nothing prepared you for that pain.

“Now that I have your attention, Miss O’Hara, I’d like you to do something for me.” The man leaned down over her and brandished the communicator. “I know there’s a way to call only one of you Joes at a time. I’d like you to do that, please.”

“No.”

One of the men holding her drove a fist into her belly. She was looking up at the man standing over her and didn’t see it coming. She mewled and doubled over, supported by the two attackers flanking her. Her popped shoulder socket burned and sparked with pain with every movement. Her arm hung uselessly at her side, turned with the elbow out, stiff and unnatural.

“I’d like you to do that, please.”

“ _No_.”

The man on her left side drove the meaty part of his palm into her scapula, making the joint rattle and bone scrape together. She screamed again, a real one, which was cut short by the lead man taking her chin in his hand and puckering her lips.

“I’d like you to do that, please.”

Scarlett breathed shakily. Her resolve was weakening and her body was failing. Every soldier had the possibility of coming to this point, and none of them handled it well. She was tasting death like the first whiff of spring, the perfume familiar and pungent-sweet.

“Who?” she asked around panting.

“Your old friend Duke. That’s what he calls himself, yes?”

Scarlett was shivering. It was cold in the room, yes – the window was letting in October chill – but she also recognized the signs of shock setting in. She hadn’t had to endure a beating in a long time, and certainly never this bad. Her face was swollen, her ribs were sore, and she was sure there had to be some sort of internal bleeding going on. Certainly her face and mouth were cut up, bloodied and disfigured by their knuckles.

“Call Duke. Tell him to meet you at the coordinates of this little device. Then we’ll go and have a chat. You’ll be left here, under supervision of course, but you’ll be allowed to heal. When it’s all over, we’ll return your communicator and be on our way.”

“I’m just a pawn?” she asked, managing to be insulted. “I don’t have a part afterwards?”

“Unfortunately, no. You were just going to be the easy first step. You bungled that up a bit, but _c’est la vie_.”

“If this was easy, I don’t want to be these guys for the next steps,” she said, indicating the two henchmen beside her. They shifted and made growling noises in their throats.

“Your play, Miss O’Hara.” The man held out the communicator.

“What are you going to do to him?”

The man paused and cocked his head. “The chessmaster does not discuss battle plans with the pawns.”

“But you’re going to hurt him?”

“Scarlett, my sweet,” he said, pulling a gun from under his black sweatshirt, “I’m going to hurt you worse if you don’t-”

There was a knock on the front door, three short, soft raps.

All four of them looked at the door. Scarlett calculated, mind whirring with gears, and decided not to say a thing. If it was a neighbor, coming to complain about the crashes and bangs, there would be no good reasoning for involving them.

The men seemed to have the same idea. They fidgeted but said nothing. Perhaps they thought the intruder would go away if no one answered the knocks.

The doorknob clicked a bit as it turned. The door swung open on its oiled hinges, swinging wide all the way. The hinges were on the side closest to where they were, so there were several tense heartbeats as the identity of the person on the other side of the door was hidden. Then it hit the wall behind very gently and hung there.

Snake Eyes stepped into the kitchen, a katana in his hand.


	2. Chapter 2

If there was anything he was expecting as he walked into Shana’s apartment, it was not this. She was kneeling between two masked men in black clothes; a third stood in front. He was pointing a gun at Shana’s head.

Shana was almost beyond recognition. If it weren’t for the hair, he’d have thought it was some other woman who had wandered into her living room. Her face was purple and red with cuts and abrasions. Her swollen lips were slightly open, revealing teeth rimmed in blood. Her pale-blue shirt, the one she always wore on flights because it was comfy, she said, was blood-spattered red and brown. She was hanging between them, one arm being held behind her back, the other hanging limply. He saw the unnatural bulge of shoulder bone underneath the cotton shirt and recognized dislocation.

“ _Snake Eyes_ ,” she whispered, almost a breath.

“Who are you?” asked the standing-up man, the one with the gun pointed at her head. Snake Eyes moved his head slightly, looking at the assailants for the first time, and promised to kill him first.

“They’re going to get Duke-!”

The two men wrenched at her, making her cry out, and Snake Eyes had the _shuriken_ in his hand and his hand was up ready to throw when the man with the gun tutted.

“Uh uh uh.”

The click of the gun cocking was audible to all of them. He pressed the muzzle of the gun against her skull, pushing slightly so that her head tilted. Her eyes were closed now, or perhaps too swollen and bruised to open anymore. She was wheezing in short and shallow breaths, and even ten feet away he could see her trembling.

“Miss O’Hara put up a good fight, stranger. It would be a waste for it to end so soon.” The man’s voice was silky, even coming through the mask. “Are you a Joe? You all wear such silly outfits.”

Snake Eyes didn’t want to engage the man, but the longer he got to talking, and the more he could draw out the standoff, the more time he had to appraise it. The longer Shana went in that position, though, the worse off she would be when he would finally be able to get her to medical care. He paused a moment, his gaze behind the visor flipping back and forth between Shana’s face and that of the man’s. Then he nodded slowly.

“Then you have a communicator too.”

He nodded. That was a lie. He didn’t carry the Joe radio, though he knew Shana would have liked it. She was the only one who could get a hold of him if he was needed, using a private, protected phone line.

“So you can get a hold of Mr. Hauser for us, as well. Miss O’Hara here refused. I think I’d much prefer if you do it. So much more to lose.” He pressed his index finger on the trigger a fraction of a pound harder.

“He can’t,” Shana said. Her eyes were still closed. “He lied. He’s not a Joe. He doesn’t have a radio.”

The three men looked at Snake in an almost comical unison, then back at her.

“I have to do it. I’m the one with the codes.”

Now she was lying. There weren’t any codes needed over the secure frequency, unless she was talking about military terminology, which anyone could know.

“Tsk, tsk, Miss O’Hara. Leaving things out like that will surely get someone hurt.”

“So hurt me,” she snarled, her eyes opening and her head turning to glare up at the man. The gun slid through her hair and onto her forehead with the motion as he kept it hard and steady. “Hurt _me_ , I’m the Joe. Let this loser here go and keep me. I can get you Duke. Remember why you came here.”

The leader laughed a pleasant little titter. “My, my. The bravery of a soldier. Well, my mysterious, masked friend, it seems like the tables have turned yet again. I told Miss O’Hara here that we would be leaving her here to rest and heal up while our business with Duke was done, but it looks like that plan is scrapped as well. Last chance to tell us the truth… maybe you want to bargain for her life, as well? Do the ol’ switcheroo yet again?”

Snake Eyes rubbed one fingertip against his _shuriken_ , debating his next move. He knew about the emergency beacon on the radio and also about the failsafe. If a Joe radio were to be destroyed, smashed, burnt, anything, it automatically sent out the emergency signal to the Joe HQ. That’s why they all kept one on their person; if the worst were to happen, GI Joe would find their comrade quickly. There would be no way to get Shana away from the gun in time, though. Several plans involving several of his weapons flashed through his mind, but these were all plans and weapons utilized for the shadowy conduction of ninjutsu, where a loved one _wasn’t_ being held at gunpoint. He stared at Shana and silently promised her it would be all right. She had turned her head a bit to look at him, her chin jutting out in that familiar look of stubborn determination beneath the blood.

“Fine. Miss O’Hara, the communicator.” The man held out the small box to her.

Snake Eyes watched her glare up at him. “I need my arm,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Release her. Remember, Miss O’Hara: I have the gun and you have a broken shoulder.”

Shana wrenched her good arm away from the man and took the communicator in her hand. It was smaller than a ring box, connectable to the detachable earpiece they wore on away missions. It clipped to clothing, belts, or could ride along in a purse or backpack. It was ingenious, in its own way, and he knew the Joes felt naked without them.

She looked at him, her battered face beautiful, and he knew what she was going to do the second before she did it, and he stepped forward to buy her the extra seconds she would need.

“Stop!” shouted the man with the gun, taking it off Shana and pointing it to him. At the same instant, Shana pressed a fingernail onto the tiny red button on the side of the device while their attention was off her. Then she pressed the regular button and said, “Scarlett for Duke.”

There was a crackle of feedback while the connection was filtered through the database deep in the Pit, matching voice cues and finding the exact right frequency to bounce the message that had been recorded there back to Duke’s own radio. They all waited in tense silence.

“Scarlett?”

“Duke-”

“What’s going on? Your emergency beacon just turned on-”

The man with the gun slammed Shana across the face with the barrel of the gun. Snake Eyes took three bounding leaps and buried his katana into the belly of one of the kneeling men, slicing him up from the groin towards his neck before following the motion through towards the man with the gun, the man he’d promised to kill first.

Shana was moving on the floor, holding her head with her good arm, trying to get her footing beneath her. The second man picked her up in his arms, yanking her backwards and making her injured arm swing, making her shriek. Snake Eyes turned towards the noise in a reflex, his katana going out to stab the man with the gun, his other hand throwing the _shuriken_ without looking.

The gun went off so close that he felt the burn of cordite. He was lifted off his feet and thrown backwards onto the linoleum. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t think- he heard, though. He heard Shana screaming, over and over, “Snake Eyes! Snake Eyes! No, get off me! Snake Eyes!”

The burning on his head wasn’t from gunpowder, he realized slowly, and he wanted to move, but he couldn’t even lift a hand. His eyesight was dimming, and he felt the itch of unconsciousness spreading over his mind. Shana was screaming but he couldn’t do a goddamn thing. Then a cry was cut short, much more damning than anything else that had happened that night, and he needed to get up, get up, _get up damn you_ but he was too heavy.

Another sound, closer, this one tinny and urgent: “Scarlett? Scarlett, do you copy? Scarlett!”

His gloved hand closed around the radio. He spoke but no sound came out. He said, “Duke, I’m here. Scarlett’s in trouble. Help. Help.” But no sound came.


	3. Chapter 3

She came back to herself just as the car door was slamming closed, as the engine rumbled to life and the leather seat beneath her began to vibrate. Every muscle in her body ached, from her neck to her shoulders to her gut to her legs. She was on her right side, looking up at the profiles of the two remaining masked men as they buckled themselves into their seats and sped away, just fast enough to create distance but not so fast that the tires peeled in a shriek to catch anyone’s attention. Her wrists and ankles were bound with plastic zip ties, and her dislocated shoulder joint was turned unnaturally to account for the position of her arm in front of her so that it throbbed with pain and startled her with every heartbeat, as if she forgot it was there until the next time. There was a tight gag around her mouth and cheeks, pinning her tongue and sapping up her spit so she couldn’t swallow.

She hovered in and out of consciousness even as she tried so hard to count the turns, to picture herself on the grid of her neighborhood, like a pinpoint that moved across a digital map on a smartphone. This information would be vital, and she knew her training.

She also knew she was in serious trouble. The ambush hadn’t gone well for either side. The men in the masks had an agenda that she couldn’t see yet, but no doubt it would have to turn into something far greater and deadlier than they had anticipated. Why Duke? Why her? She still harbored doubts that this was a Cobra operation, but surely she and Duke did not have any more enemies? Foreign enemies of the state, who would have the manpower and the will to go through with a high-profile kidnapping like this one, would not single out two lone soldiers of a classified military unit. She did not think Duke had ties to drug cartels, the Mafia, street gangs, or anyone else domestic who would need to lure him out of the Pit. The public knew bits and pieces about Cobra’s true face, about G.I. Joe, about the day-to-day operations of the military on American soil, but nothing that could warrant something like this. The only bits she knew for sure were that it was personal and the men were professionals. She also knew they had underestimated her.

Scarlett moved her head against the seat when a speed bump in the road jostled her. She was bleeding into the leather, the tacky smears of blood on her face drying to the seat. Every movement hurt, especially in the position she was in. Her eyes closed, unbidden, and when they opened again, the ambient light coming in through the windows high above her face was different. She had lost more time again, drifting on the waters between alertness and twilight sleep.

The car switched off, catching her off-guard. She forced herself to stay awake, to ignore the pain. There would be time to heal and rest and sleep later. A bed in the hospital ward of the Pit would be waiting for her when she got away. Never before had she yearned to be in a hospital bed, and now that she was doing so, she felt sick. She would sell that damn apartment and live on base permanently, like many of her fellow Joes. It would be hard giving up that side of herself, especially since she had so many memories and years in that place, but she knew she would never be able to sleep soundly there again.

The men got out of the car in the same motion, and the driver opened the door to grab her ankles and pull her out like a slab of meat. She gasped as the movement shook her and tried to kick, but the angle was wrong and she had no power behind it.

The other man, the leader – she could tell by his shape, having memorized it compared to the second stoolie – came around the trunk and flicked out a tactical knife. Scarlett watched him warily, ready to give it her all, one last go, but he merely leaned down to cut the plastic tie that bound her ankles. At the same time, the second man pulled her fully out of the car and swung her to her feet so that she was standing facing the car, the two of them behind her. They wound arms into hers, placing palms on both of the very top of her shoulders, and marched her backwards and then around the car, towards the dark building a few steps away she could see was their destination.

There didn’t seem to be anyone around to hear even if she had been able to scream. They were on the waterfront somewhere along the Potomac, well out of the heart of downtown DC, and she recognized the dead signs of a place that was long-abandoned. It was darker and colder here. She was in a T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes. It was October, and the news had forecasted an unseasonable dusting of snow later that night.

“This way,” said the leader, not unkindly.

They walked her through a door that had been padlocked with a new, heavy chain and industrial lock. The leader flashed a key and unlocked it, undoing the chain so that it fell through his fingers like clinking silk.

Inside the building, it was dark and dusty but thankfully warm. They had set up a base command; a card table and three chairs were standing in the center of the crumbling wooden and concrete room. A small floodlight and a space heater were already going, hidden from the outside by the heavy boards of plywood and sheet metal that covered the numerous windows. Long orange extension cords snaked out and away, further than she could see, providing electricity. She was absurdly thankful for the warmth and the light. It would help her.

For a wild moment, Scarlett thought maybe they were going to pull the oldest mistake in the kidnapper’s handbook and lock her in some room, sight unseen, where she could manifest a plan for escape, but then they turned her sharply, making her stumble over her dragging feet, and sat her down in another folding chair in a dim corner. The leader broke the plastic tie around her wrists and she lunged and swung, but the second man was waiting, pulling her backwards by the throat and keeping her in the spindly seat until the leader ziptied her wrists to the back of the chair and her calves to the legs, above the crossbeam where she would have no chance of slipping out. The leader untied the thick fabric of the gag and pulled it out of her mouth, dropping it on the floor beside her feet.

The building was a single room, as far as she had been able to tell now that she’d seen both the outside façade and the inside, with a door in the front and a door in the back. It was about the size of a large cabin with all the inner walls torn down, and she assumed it had been some old ranger’s station. It was completely empty except for the incongruously clean items in the center, to where the masked men now retreated, holding themselves as if they were sore. The stoolie was rubbing his lower back.

Scarlett felt a wave of nausea hit her and almost didn’t make it. She turned her head and vomited across her good shoulder, tensing and releasing in the whole-body contraction that came with it. It made her want to sing out with the pain; the last thing her muscles wanted was more movement, more tension, but she had no choice in the matter. She sagged when it was over, after a few minor aftershock gags that blinded her with the bitter shudders.

She could hear the men muttering. Her head tipped back.

“Don’t pass out,” said the leader, sounding close to her. His pseudo-kind voice was back, talking with the genteel velvet that she imagined had been cultivated and trimmed after a childhood of watching black and white movies. “If you vomit again, you’ll choke.” His finger touched her cheek.

Scarlett jerked away, turning her face to the other side, as if she could get away. “That’s not in the plan?”

“It would put a wrench in it, yes.”

“So you wouldn’t have killed me in my apartment.”

“Ah, well, yes, we would have, if it had come to it, but thankfully it didn’t. Now that we have you here, it would be in our best interests, as well as yours I imagine, if we could avoid it.”

Scarlett panted, trying to ease herself back into the dull ache that she’d settled on in the car ride over. Pain was a theory until you actually experienced it, and she was getting quite a lesson in it now. Her eyes were swollen and thick with blood, so much that she had to strain to keep her eyelids apart. Her dislocated shoulder was fire beneath her skin, the throbbing to her heartbeat distracting and unwelcome. Her gut was sore from the beating, and not for the first time she wondered about internal bleeding. She had little practical experience and know-how about medicine. She’d been in the field dressing wounds and patching up fellows more times than she wanted to remember, but it was never the same twice. Hell, watching Duke’s heart stop over the summer had pretty much soured her on the idea of ever having to be around a hospital room ever again. But she was smart, and she knew the general idea, and she knew combat procedure, and she knew she wouldn’t last long if she had bruising that went deeper than just her skin. If something had ruptured or severed within her, she wouldn’t have long at all. She went to look at the vomit puddle beside her.

“No blood,” said the leader. His mask was disconcerting in the way that Snake Eyes’ had never been. She could see his eyes through little cuts in the thick woolen fabric, but when shadows fell over them, it made him look demonic. “Don’t worry, we wouldn’t let you just bleed to death.”

“Oh yeah? Gonna operate on me here, doc?”

“If everything goes smoothly from here on, Miss O’Hara, you’ll be back with your fellows in a few hours. We won’t need to operate. You’re not going to die… and frankly, if you hadn’t put up such a struggle, we wouldn’t have needed to match your actions.”

Scarlett snickered in a gurgling, throaty way. Sure, blame her for what they’d done. It didn’t get more classy. She sloshed some spit around her mouth, trying to get rid of the acrid burn of vomit on her tongue, and didn’t reply.

The leader seemed to sense that she was done playing along with them and turned away from her.

“What do I call you?”

“Hm?”

“If I needed to distinguish you from Lackey No. 2 over there.” She jerked her chin in the other man’s direction and flashed him a severe grin at the way his gloved hands curled into fists, like he wouldn’t mind going a few more rounds with her.

“Call him Spade. I’m Marlowe.”

Scarlett coughed on a laugh that spluttered and false-started a few times before it became full-bodied and derisive. The leader, Marlowe, stood heavy on one leg, his head cocked, figuring out this sudden shift in emotion.

“Like the detectives? Like the film noir detectives?” Scarlett said between gasps. She could feel her ribcage tightening and knew she was on the knife’s edge between laughter and hysteria, a full-blown panic attack edging in.

The man emanated displeasure, despite her not being able to see his face. He took a few steps to her and stood over her in her accusatory glee before slapping her cheek with a flat palm.

Her laughter died instantly. She hung across the chair, her head down, taking a few breaths to right herself. Then she lifted her chin again and met his gaze with her own. Several choice insults were tumbling through her mind, ready to fly at any time, but she had a feeling psychological warfare wasn’t the way to go just yet. He was obviously prideful and easily offended. His wounds were going to have to be inflicted emotionally, but only when the time was right.

Spade, the assistant, was standing beside the card table. Bottles of water and beer were standing on the plastic surface. He muttered to his boss as Marlowe went and sat at the table, but Marlowe shook his head and replied softly, just below the threshold of making out words.

Scarlett shivered. The zip ties around her calves were tight, cutting into the muscle and bone, and now that she didn’t have the distraction of conversation, every sensory input from her body was coming in ten-fold.

To distract herself from her physical pain, she allowed herself to sink down into the dark place she’d put aside since leaving her apartment, testing those waters by remembering how Snake’s head had snapped backwards, how his body had crumpled to the floor. She’d seen him knocked out and she’d seen him injured, and none of those times had he fallen to the ground with such graceless heaviness. The boom of the gun echoed in her memory. The spray of light from the muzzle, illuminating his masked face for a fraction of a second, replayed over and over, as did the way his legs had turned to dead things, his torso falling like a puppet with its strings cut. She had been fighting Spade, the assistant, and she hadn’t seen where the bullet had gone, but Marlowe had been pointing it high, and Snake had lunged so close, and his head had snapped backwards so fast, that there weren’t many choices for her to imagine. Her one hope, her one thought that kept herself from giving up, was the memory that she had activated her Joe radio beacon. GI Joe would be scrambling to her position by following the little square radio’s signal. Even if Duke hadn’t thrown a wrench in things by interrupting her, the rest of HQ would have gone into hyperdrive mere seconds after the first alarm bell had sounded in the control room. Snake Eyes had saved her life more times than she could honestly remember, especially during the wayward year of the Original Joes, and she was sure that if he was still alive, he would get the best treatment from GI Joe when they found him.

The memories of the last few minutes of the fight, the last few moments of her freedom, were raw and frustrating, and she dwelled on them next. She wouldn’t kid herself: both men, Snake Eyes and Duke, had put more than a few kinks in things. If only Duke hadn’t had the stupid misfortune of being in Control to hear her emergency signal; if only Snake Eyes had arrived seconds earlier than when he had. She knew blaming them was straw man, even if it was convenient, but she’d been doing just fine before they had bumbled through her game plan. She was reduced now to mourning Snake and fearing for Duke – and herself – until the other shoe dropped.

She felt tears brimming on her swollen bottom lids and hated the sharp, sweet pain that pricked her inner eye. She wasn’t a crier. Most soldiers weren’t. She thought maybe it was the foreignness of the situation that was making her emotional. Maybe it was the exhaustion that brought her back to the toddler days of crying when you were sleepy.

More nausea suddenly hit her and she tried to hold it back this time. She’d been hit in the head at least once hard enough to knock her out, when they were dragging her away from Snake Eyes, which always meant concussion. She threw up again, the last of the overpriced soda and sandwich she’d eaten at the terminal in Atlanta before heading home. This time she nearly lost her balance as the retching seized her, and she had to plant her sneakers on the concrete to keep herself from tipping over. When she raised her head, breathing hard, Spade and Marlowe were looking at her from their card table, each drinking a bottle of water. The force of the contraction had made her tears squeeze out freely onto her cheeks.

She was dizzy and hoped to god she would stay conscious. The last thing she needed was to be even more vulnerable to the two men than she was already. She blinked several times at them, her head swaying. She had never been one to drink, preferring the cold hard sobriety of life to anything a bottle or a pill could give her, but she knew this is what it felt like.

Then Marlowe was in front of her holding a torn bath towel. It was damp and cold but it felt like magical salve against her hot skin as he rubbed her face and right arm, where she’d gotten some vomit on herself the second time. Scarlett wanted to snap at him but, selfishly, she didn’t want to be hit again.

“Miss O’Hara, it’s going to be a few hours while my associates and myself regroup. There is a mattress we commissioned for this detail in the back. Would you like if I dragged it out here so you could lie down and rest?”

She went cold at the implications. The last thing she wanted was to be tied on her back to a mattress. The thought revolted her, shooting through her body like an electric shock, and her face must have twisted so that Marlowe shook his head to himself like he couldn’t believe he’d even entertained the thought.

“My apologies,” he murmured, and went away.

Spade was chuckling. Scarlett threw an ugly look at him but couldn’t do much more than that.

After that, she spent what felt like an hour or two hovering between sharp, painful alertness and fuzzy, disorienting unconsciousness. Everything that hurt in her body and mind throbbed and pulsed, never letting up. She had been hoping in vain that the aches would at least begin to subside, but sitting tied to a chair was probably not conducive to the healing process. It only managed to get worse, especially in her left shoulder and stomach. She breathed with her ribcage instead of using her belly like Snake Eyes had taught her. Several minutes of fighting the pain in her abdomen muscles proved too much to handle. It would take a while, but she would need to regain strength for the next part of the fight, so she breathed, and she waited.


	4. Chapter 4

“That one,” shouted Duke over the roar of the rotors. He was standing behind the pilot’s chair, scanning the ground beneath with the same urgency as everyone else in the helicopter. The emergency beacon from Scarlett’s radio had erupted exactly one hundred and thirty seven minutes ago. One hundred and thirty one minutes ago, two jets scrambled on the runways over the Pit, carrying half a dozen GI Joes in battle wear. The jets had made it to Mach Four for most of the flight, flying low and tight to the country. A helicopter had been waiting for them at Andrews Air Force Base to take them into the heart of DC as they followed the signal.

Duke was restless. Both flights had found him pacing back and forth with the other Joes watching. They’d had emergency signals before, two very close calls and one false alarm, but it was different with Scarlett. Duke found that he loved every Joe like a brother or sister, knew each one and respected them as deeply and as utterly as a person could, but it was different with the Originals. They were still singled out to be team leaders more often than not; they were hailed and spoken to with a sort of reverence, even by the Joes that had followed them along the year-long ordeal, like Barbeque or Breaker. And, humble as they were, the five Originals had almost bought into the hype. They knew this was all because of them. And, therefore, they were a team-within-a-team, close-knit like soulmates. Scarlett activating her emergency beacon was as nerve-wracking as any combat he’d ever been in, as scary as waiting for biopsy results or the drive to a hospital after getting a call about an accident.

He’d never been to her civilian apartment, but he’d heard about it. Quick snooping on the internet had drudged up plenty of articles from years before about the brave Army officer who had faced down several armed assailants to her home. He’d asked her once about it, and she’d been mysterious, saying only that it had helped confirm her theories about Cobra. But he’d looked through the news van footage and the many photographs, seeing a Shana O’Hara fresh out of PT wear, wearing an expression of hard resolve but still very, very young, and he felt a kind of loss for that fresh-faced lieutenant.

That internet investigation helped him now, however. He recognized the building, the dark gray brick and the white trim, even without the help of the GPS tracker. He scooted backwards into the body of the huey and turned to the rest of his teammates, a veritable hodgepodge of specialists with backgrounds as diverse as their talents. He wanted to address them but didn’t. There wouldn’t be much to say if they found the worst, and he didn’t want to have to go through with a second speech after if it came to that.

Wild Bill brought down the huey as close to the graveled roof as he could and signaled for them to file out.

“Go, go, go!” shouted Duke, making a disembark movement with his hands. He jumped the three feet to the roof and ducked his head against the whipping winds from the rotors. “Wild Bill, circle round for as long as you can, and stay close because we might need you!” he shouted into his earpiece, hoping the pilot could hear him. The pilot threw him a thumbs-up and departed as soon as the last of the six Joes were out.

“Alright guys, let’s go. We don’t know which one it is, so we have to clear the building.”

Duke led the team in a jog across the roof to the door that opened immediately into a staircase. Behind him, Tunnel Rat, Lady Jaye, Law, Lifeline, and Doc followed him, their various weapons at the ready. He banged through the doorway and down the stairs into a hallway, his troops close behind.

There were four doors branching off from this floor, but only one wide open. Duke looked to his left, saw Tunnel Rat looking at it with a grim expression on his face, and then approached. Behind them, another door opened, and a bleary face peeked out at them.

“Ma’am, if there’s no trouble in your apartment, get back inside,” hissed Law with his best cop’s voice. The face disappeared, and they heard the slide of a lock clicking into place.

“Scarlett?” Duke called softly, sweeping the room with his weapon and then his gaze as soon as he got to the doorway. He saw a dark kitchen with cheerful yellow curtains and a matching floor. It was freezing cold inside. A small rolling suitcase lay on its back beside the door. He saw a kitchen table pushed sideways and dining chairs in disarray, one lying on its side. He saw bloodstains and a few streaks, like someone had slipped through it. He saw a body.

“Doc!” Duke cried. The medical officer pushed past him and knelt beside the body, a male figure in black.

“There’s another one,” the doctor said, busy opening his bag and bringing out his gear. The other medic pushed past too, but they could all see this one was dead. Glistening purple and pink guts hung from his stomach. He was also clothed in black, a mask on his face like the other one. Duke stepped into the living area and didn’t look at the figures on the ground. They looked like robbers, and he wondered if Scarlett had killed them before fleeing.

Duke, Tunnel Rat, and Lady Jaye cleared the rest of the apartment, Duke noticing despite himself that Scarlett’s civilian home was cute and homey, almost incongruous with her personality. There was nothing else amiss in the other rooms; the bedroom looked like it hadn’t been touched for weeks.

“Guys!” called Law from the kitchenette. “It’s Snake Eyes!”

Duke’s stomach dropped. He half-stumbled back into the main room and stood on the carpeted half, staring at Snake Eyes’ supine, unmoving body in the middle of the cold room. Someone had switched on the lights and closed the door. In the light, the blood stood out horribly against the linoleum.

“Oh, Jesus,” whispered Tunnel Rat beside him.

“Is he dead?” he asked tonelessly.

“No,” said Lifeline, who was assisting Doc at taking vitals. “He’s in shock, though. We gotta warm him up.”

Law closed the kitchen window. Lady Jaye went back into the bedroom to wrestle blankets off Scarlett’s bed.

“Scarlett’s radio,” Tunnel Rat said, his sharp eyes picking out the small device in Snake’s hand. He knelt beside the two medics and pried it out. “Look, Duke, it’s definitely hers.”

“Where is she, though?” asked Duke, taking the radio. His eyes followed the pattern of bloodstains and smears, unable to read the story they told.

“Woah, woah!” shouted Doc, making them all flinch. “Easy, Snake, easy.”

“Snake Eyes,” Duke said, dropping to his knees and edging close to the ninja’s legs. “Where’s Scarlett?”

Snake was breathing harshly, a troubling sign. His head was rolling on the floor, but behind the mask, none of them could tell if he was even awake.

“Doc, we got a wound,” Lifeline said. His hands were covered with blue doctor’s gloves. When he’d reached out to hold the ninja’s head still, his fingers had come away bloody.

Every Joe in the room took a breath. They knew what that meant. To get to the injury, the medics would have to take off the mask. Doc was taking blood pressure with a cuff wrapped around the ninja’s upper arm, his lips pursed. He was taking too long. Then: “Duke, the rest of you go outside.”

Snake Eyes lifted a hand and pinched his thumb, index, and middle finger together.

“Are you sure?” asked Doc. He was fluent in sign language, remnants from a Deaf grandmother in his childhood. In the very, very rare times Snake Eyes had been at the Pit in need of medical care, they were able to have long conversations, Snake answering the doctor’s questions while they were holed up in a private wing of the medical ward. No one but Doc had ever seen Snake Eyes out of the costume. Well, Doc and Scarlett, maybe – but no one had ever asked about that.

His hand went into a fist and bobbed up and down at the wrist.

“Alright. Lifeline, get the mask off. Snake Eyes, are you hurt anywhere else?”

The three-finger pinch again.

“What is the wound on your head?”

His hand made the unmistakable shape of a gun, the tip of his thumb coming down.

“Lifeline, now! Snake Eyes, why didn’t you-”

Suddenly the kitchen was a bustle of energy. Lady Jaye tucked the blankets around the ninja’s legs and body, Law spoke to the Pit over his radio earpiece, updating them, and Tunnel Rat slid on the linoleum to kneel at the crown of Snake’s head, helping to peel the mask off.

Duke stood, fascinated despite himself. He’d always wondered what the man underneath looked like. He knew Snake’s skin tone; he’d seen it beneath rips and tears in the costume, and from the security footage of O’Hara’s lab, he knew the ninja was blond. But he’d always wondered… after the explosion there, the grainy video had shown a very torn up Snake emerging from the wreckage, and he couldn’t help but have a morbid fascination with the idea of a person so scarred that he didn’t dare show his face.

Lifeline and Tunnel Rat worked delicately, trying to do as little harm as they could to the gunshot wound as they peeled and rolled the mask upwards, past his neck, where the scar shone bright and ugly, even to this day; past his lips, which Duke himself had seen turn into an almost-smile; past his cheeks, which were flushed; then up, past the eyes, which were closed and squeezing in pain.

Duke stared at the man behind the mask. Snake Eyes was younger than he’d pictured; from Kim’s description, he’d thought Snake Eyes was at least ten years older than her, but it couldn’t have been more than five or six. He was still blond, but his hair was buzzed so close he was almost bald; in patches, it didn’t grow at all where ugly burn tissue marred his skin. The burns continued down past his forehead and around his eyes and upper cheeks, in pale pink blotches that blended better than the scar on his throat, which was the thing Duke stared at the most.

Snake Eyes turned his head to the right so Lifeline, on his left, could see the gunshot wound. It was a streak across his skull, the short hair making it easy to see the path. It bled with the superficiality of a cut, but around it the skin was angry and red, and even from the distance Duke could see it was swollen and raised.

“Lucky son of a bitch,” Doc said. “I don’t think there’s much bone damage.”

Doc and Lifeline busied over him, Tunnel Rat assisting where he could. Doc opened one of Snake’s eyes with his fingers and shone a penlight into it, watching the reaction of the dark pupil as it contracted. Then he did the other one, and Duke saw his eyes were gray-blue, icy and intense. He remembered Kim’s voice telling the story of his origin with the Arashikage: “The steely eyes of the serpent.”

“Parietal hairline fracture, if anything,” muttered Lifeline, his fingers probing the area of his skull. Snake Eyes was grimacing in pain again, but suddenly he shot up, pushing off the floor with his hands and dragging Doc and Lifeline along with him.

“Easy! Easy!” Duke commanded, his hands up. He squatted to get his eyes level with Snake’s. “You’re hurt, man, you need to calm down.”

Snake Eyes signed a couple of motions very rapidly with one hand, looking at Doc.

“Where is she?”

Law and Lady Jaye both came to kneel in front of the ninja too, looking at him quietly, better at listening than anyone. Duke realized he must have signed Scarlett’s name. “Snake Eyes, what happened to her?”

“‘Taken. Three men in masks,’” translated Doc, who was struggling to push his patient back to the floor again. “No, lie down first, no. ‘Fight. Blood.’ This is hers?”

The ninja nodded, his face expressionless. It was eerie, seeing his eyes now, seeing how they darted around and took in everything, seeing everyone, calculating and analyzing. His face would have been handsome if it wasn’t scarred.

“Where did they take her?”

Snake Eyes turned his face to Duke, but his gaze lowered, like he couldn’t make eye contact. His hand went flat like he was about to salute, just the tips of his fingers touching his forehead. Then he pulled the hand away and turned it so the palm was facing Duke.

“He doesn’t know,” Doc said. “That’s fine, right now we need to worry about you. Lie back or I’ll sedate you.”

Tunnel Rat and Duke went to the window that had been open, searching the countertop or windowsill for any hints.

“Think they took her out the window?”

Duke opened it again and received a blast of chilly air as he stuck his head out. They could hear the hum of Wild Bill in the huey doing large circles above the building, but the rest of the city was quiet. “There’s a fire escape that leads all the way to the ground. If they were coercing her, they could have gotten her down to a car or something parked in the alley.”

There was a rap of knuckles of linoleum and the two of them turned back to the ninja, who had returned to lying on his back. He managed an awkward sign with both hands from that position even while the two medics were working over him.

“Doc?”

“‘Unconscious.’”

“She was knocked out?” Duke turned away and looked down the side of the building again, trying to see it. “They could have easily carried her if she were KO’d.”

Snake Eyes lifted his hands and made another sign in the air near his stomach.

“I have some,” said Lady Jaye. She tipped forward onto her knees and dug a small notebook out of her pants pocket.

Duke came close and watched her hand it to him along with a short, chewed-on pencil. “You know sign?”

“That one was obvious.” Lady Jaye managed a grim smile and turned back to Snake, taking the paper from him once he was done scribbling. “‘They want Duke beat up S to get to him change of plans took her don’t know where will probably try again.’”

There was a chill in the air that had nothing to do with the open window. All the Joes, even the medics, looked up at Duke, and for a fraction of a moment he thought he saw accusations there, as if this was his fault. But that was silly, and he banished those thoughts quickly as he turned and motioned for Tunnel Rat to close the window again.

“So what do we do?” asked Law. He was kneading his hands on top of his knees as he kneeled beside Lady Jaye. “There’s no trail to follow.”

“According to Snake, they’ll try to get in contact again,” said Duke slowly, trying to think faster than the situation was going.

“But they have to know that GI Joe is on to them by now. Scarlett turned on her emergency beacon and one of them shot Snake Eyes. There’s no way they think they can just lure you to a location.”

“They have Scarlett. She’s the leverage.”

“But Duke-”

“I don’t know,” he snarled, beginning to pace. “I don’t, I don’t know them, I have no idea why they want me.”

His troops stared at him again.

“No clues?” Tunnel Rat asked. His voice was harsh and his expression was ugly. “No hints at all?”

“None,” Duke said honestly, his boyish face open and vulnerable. “I don’t have enemies except Cobra, who would want Scarlett just as badly as me.”

Lady Jaye was reading off a second note from Snake Eyes. “‘Not Cobra check man’s pockets.’”

Of course. Duke turned and looked at the disemboweled corpse, seeing a big man dressed all in black, a ski mask tight over his face. He pulled off the mask and saw a few superficial injuries as well as an obviously-broken nose. “Scarlett fought?” he asked over his shoulder.

There was a pause, then: “‘Before I got there.’”

Good girl. Duke patted the man down and found a gun in his waistband beneath what had been his intestines. Duke pushed those gingerly out of the way and went into the man’s pants pockets, coming out with nothing else. The men who had attacked them had known not to carry their wallets into a crime scene. He went down both legs, checking for more weapons, and came up empty.

“They jumped a soldier with a gun each?” Tunnel Rat said in disbelief. “They have no idea who we are.”

“‘Knew about radios,’” Lady Jaye said. She ripped out the latest note from the tiny spiral notebook and crumbled it, offering it back to Snake as soon as it was ready. He was writing in the air, pushing against it in her hands so he could write with the pencil across the page. Doc and Lifeline were sewing stitches into his skin, having cleaned it up as best they could. She took the notepad back and read, “‘When S activated emer they hit her shot me and left radio. Wanted her to call D ask him to meet her leave her here then give back radio and leave.’”

“Setting a trap for Duke. She was just the bait,” Law said.

“Then Snake Eyes walked into the picture and messed it up. They had to get rid of him and take her. Now they’re gonna call and get Duke to go after her.” Tunnel Rat was standing beside the windows with his arms crossed in front of his chest, his voice gloomy and pessimistic.

Duke’s fists were tightening so much his fingers began to ache. They were helpless here, waiting for a signal.

“We have to wait,” he said finally, making them all look up at them in surprise, even Snake Eyes, who wore more expression on his face than Duke had ever dreamed of seeing. “They’re in control right now. They have Scarlett, and we have to wait. But we’ll be ready.” He touched his blaster slung across his back. There would be hell to pay for this.


	5. Chapter 5

She planned, plotted, and schemed, but nothing was coming of it. She didn’t have a secret lockpick or nail file hidden up her sleeve. She wasn’t double-jointed, especially not with the dislocated shoulder. She wasn’t Rambo, Batman, or Ellen Ripley. There was no _deus ex machina_ coming to save her. Scarlett was on her own, very injured, very vulnerable, and not at all optimistic. The only weapon she had on her was her brain, and loathe as she was to instigate any more association with the two men, that was her only choice.

“Hey,” she said softly, her throat grating on the word. Her voice was husky to begin with, but now it sounded like she’d been gargling whiskey and cigar smoke. She tried again, saying, “ _Hey_ ,” with more insistence, making them look up from the table.

“Quiet,” snapped Spade, the lackey, but Marlowe stood and went to her.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I need water.”

“You might vomit again.”

“I don’t care.”

He appraised her, his mask doing nothing to hide the emotions and expressions in his body language. She’d been around Snake Eyes long enough to be fluent in the subtle tensions, twitches, and tells that were given away every second by someone’s body. She could read her partner like a book, and this ability translated perfectly well to complete strangers, like watching facial expressions. It was a skill she hadn’t really been consciously aware of until now, but it would make all the difference in the world.

“Please,” she added a second later. Politeness, even as fake and strained as hers, would also make a difference. Marlowe was as pompous and prissy as they came, even for a thug who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, and she knew how to mold him through her fingers.

He went and picked up a bottle whose seal hadn’t yet been broken and came back to her. He twisted off the plastic top in front of her and she was struck by the tininess and significance of this action. Maybe he was a germaphobe? Something to note down, at least. He tipped the bottle up against her lips and she swallowed greedily for a few seconds, relishing the clear taste and cool temperature. After a few swallows, he let up, but gently, hesitantly, like he was waiting for her cues. She nodded and closed her eyes.

“Thank you very much,” she said.

If he had been about to respond, she never knew. A cell phone began to ring, one of the tinny, preset ringtones that bastardized classical music with elevator muzak. Spade half-stood and underhanded the phone to Marlowe, who caught it with one hand and had pressed the screen to answer it before Scarlett could do more than breathe.

“Yes?” he said, professional and cold. “Yes. Just like I wrote in the text. Uh-huh, one down, but we’ve secured Target 1. Yes. Tied up.” He glanced at Scarlett and turned his back to her, as if that would stop her from hearing, or maybe like he was ashamed of what he was saying. Another note.

“We had to go to plan B. Yes. She alerted her unit- yes, with the comm. No. No! Believe what you want, or don’t, because I’m telling you, there’s no way to track us. We retreated to Base 2 and are holding here, like we discussed.”

His voice grew harsh but softer, like he was trying to keep himself from elevating into a full-on argument. “Well, what do _you_ want?”

Interesting.

“Target 2 knows of the capture but nothing else. We have yet to make contact. Yes, I’m waiting for direct orders. Yes. Higher up makes those kinds of calls. Termination?” His head twitched like he’d been about to turn and look at her, and she heard in his tone that what he’d said earlier was true: he didn’t want to kill her.

“No. No. Good. This will be the last chance, at least for a while. I say we continue.” He nodded to himself, like he was satisfied with what he was hearing, and muttered a goodbye before hanging up.

Scarlett closed her eyes and let her head sink forward again.

“I apologize for this, Miss O’Hara.”

“You do, do you?” she snarled softly without looking up. She concentrated on her breathing and her heartbeat. Every two-note beat meant she was still alive. Still alive. Still alive.  

“I do. Believe it or not.”

She would have chuckled bitterly, but that was rude and it was in her best interest to stay as polite and meek as possible. He seemed to like that. Instead, she shrugged her good shoulder. “So what happens now?” she asked, finally meeting his hidden gaze. Everything hurt. Everything ached.

“I assume you have your own ideas about the conversation I just had.”

“You’re on to the next step of Plan B,” she said easily, skirting the other, much more crucial points she had deduced.

“Yes.”

“Which means you need me to contact GI Joe.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

Marlowe started to affirm it before he stopped cartoonishly. “Ye- what?”

“I’m not going to help you.” So much for the meekness.

“Miss O’Hara-”

“The last time I helped you, you killed a teammate. Not again.”

He put his hands on his hips and let his head cock sideways, appraising her like a stern father. In his black outfit and ski-masked face, the effect was comical. “I’m afraid you don’t really have a choice.”

“I do. You can kill me, and you’ll never get Duke or any of the others. It stops here. Believe it or not.”

The man chuckled softly behind the mask, shaking his head in amusement. “You soldiers, I swear. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”

_What the hell does that mean?_

He stepped forward with one stride and was in her face, his whole body consuming the light coming from the center of the room, a black hole trying hard to menace her into submission. He leaned down over her, making her strain her sore neck to look up at him. She kept her expression defiant, but that slick presence of death from the apartment fight was in her chest again, and the only thing she could think was of Snake’s head snapping backwards from the bullet and of Duke’s voice echoing concern at her from the comm.

“We can make you talk,” he whispered in her ear.

“You can’t make me do anything,” she whispered back.

“I got you here, didn’t I?”

“Unconscious. Pretty sure that wouldn’t work for information extraction.”

The blank face of his mask stared at her, breathing softly. “I don’t want to kill you, Lieutenant.”

“Then don’t.”

“I’m just doing my job.”

“And I’m doing mine.”

“Protecting them at the expense of your life is not your job.”

“Protecting people with my life _is the definition of my job_ ,” she snarled, baring her teeth like an animal.

She had him there, and they both knew it. The man pulled away from her, regarded her with the blank stare so unlike Snake Eyes, then slapped her open-palm again, presumably to vent his frustrations. What a child. She was willing to bet he hadn’t been deprived of much growing up.

She sucked at the newest cut on her lip that had split with the force of the blow and turned her face away from him. Spade was chuckling again at the card table, his gloved hands wrapped around a water bottle. Scarlett narrowed her eyes at the ground as she listened. It would feel good to kill that one when – and if – she got the chance.

“Do I need to hurt you more?”

“No, you really don’t,” she said, the tiniest laugh in her voice escaping before she could capture it.

He drove a fist into her stomach, not as hard as before, but enough to make her cough and gasp.

“Do I need to continue?” he asked.

Scarlett had to summon her courage, but she answered, “I guess you do.”

This time it was a fist that hit the side of her face, right at the jaw joint which burst with pain. That one rattled her, and her vision didn’t clear for a good two minutes while she moaned and drooped.

“This is only hurting you, O’Hara,” he said.

Her gasps turned into a sob once or twice, but she forced herself to sit up against the restraints, her face wide and vulnerable to him. It felt like many of the cuts she’d gotten in her apartment had opened up again as she’d been tossed around on the chair by the blows.

“Will you call GI Joe?”

“No.”

A punch to the nose that felt like it broke it.

“Will you call GI Joe?”

“No.”

A deep punch to the intestines, low and fierce.

“Will you-”

“Wait!”

He waited.

Scarlett panted raggedly, slumped over in her chair, her wrists tied to the beams at her sides. “Wait, wait,” she mumbled.

He waited.

“If you- I’ll call them.”

“If?”

 “If you pop my shoulder back in. I can’t take it. I can’t.. I can’t think.”

He didn’t say anything. Scarlett kept her face down, measuring everything from the timing to the timbre of her voice.

“I can’t,” he said finally, but he sounded unsure, his voice trailing away.

“Have you ever dislocated something? It’s like fire, Marlowe. It’s like…” She choked on what was about to be another sob and swallowed it down, getting a hold of herself. This time she wasn’t acting. She really was in so much pain she wanted to scream. “It’s being burned, over and over. Please, please, pop it back in. God, please.”

“Don’t, boss,” called Spade from the card table.

“Shut up. Come here.”

“Boss!”

“ _Now_.”

Scarlett herself quailed at the venom in his voice, but her heart leapt. Spade kicked up from his seat and came over to them with his boots scuffing against the cement floor, a child obeying his father’s commands but doing it as insolently as possible. He stood on her other side.

“Cut the ties. Keep the knife in your hand,” Marlowe said. He put both hands on her shoulders and squeezed a bit. She whimpered but stared up at him.

“If you try anything, we’ll kill you. Then we’ll kidnap another member of your precious unit and kill them too. Then we’ll kill another, and another. One by one until there’s no one left. GI Joe can’t keep them safe. We’ll find your purported hidden base and fill the vents with mustard gas so your teammates drop where they stand. We’ll do this even if we don’t have to, but just because you pissed me off by trying anything. You are going to obey my commands when this is finished. Do you understand?”

The soldier swallowed thickly. “Yes.”

He nodded. “Just so we’re clear. Spade, the ties.”

They broke the plastic zip-ties around her feet at the same time. She didn’t move except to relax her muscles and flex her toes. She didn’t think she’d be able to jump up and fight even if that was in her plan at the moment. Her body sagged in the chair, and she was grunting with the pain, making tiny sounds that she couldn’t help. Then they broke the ties around her wrists. She moaned one long note of pain as the motion jostled her shoulder. She wasn’t lying – the dislocation really was the most painful injury she’d ever had. She remembered the electric shocks she’d received over the summer at the hands of Zarana and found herself wishing for that instead.

“Up on your feet,” the leader said. She struggled with that, so they had to help her. Her body hung like a dead weight in their hands. She wasn’t doing anything to make it easier on them. It was her own tiny, personal rebellion. She had to pretend she was weak, weaker than she actually was.

“Do you know what to do?” she asked when she as standing on her own between them.

“Yes. You have to lie down on the floor.”

Scarlett made a face of displeasure but bent her knees, gingerly working her way to a sitting position. Then she tensed her sore abdomen and lowered herself onto her back. “Marlowe, the same goes for me. What you said. If something happens here tonight, GI Joe won’t stop until you and the people you work for are dead. Not just dead, either. Tortured. There’s no honor in hurting me.”

“We know that,” said Marlowe, almost kindly, almost, like he really believed what he was doing was okay, but Spade made a sound of derision from his throat that Scarlett didn’t like one bit. But she nodded at him, accepting that her threats were emptier than his because of her tentative position as the captive. She believed whole-heartedly in what she was saying, though, confident that GI Joe wouldn’t rest until they had hunted down everyone responsible for this kidnapping, especially if she turned up dead. The thing she feared more was sexual assault. That was what she’d meant. She hoped the man had understood that.

“All right.” He switched places with Spade, so that he knelt on her left side, and grasped her wrist. “I’m going to pull at your wrist, turning your arm, until the joint slides back into place. It’s going to hurt.”

Scarlett nodded with her eyes closed.

“Spade is going to hold your other shoulder to provide counterweight. He might have to pull as well.”

If she felt a single hand anywhere but her arm or shoulders she would punch and claw and kick until they killed her.

But no. The men were true to their word. Marlowe grasped her wrist with a gentle but firm grip and began to slowly turn it, torqueing it back into place. Spade was on her other side, both hands holding the roundness of her shoulder and upper arm. She gasped once when he first began the movement, then stopped herself, breathing in and out slowly. She used her belly instead of her diaphragm to breathe this time. It made a difference.

“Am I hurting you?”

She wanted to scream, ‘Of course, Sherlock! You did this! You killed my friend! You beat me bloody!’ But she only nodded.

“C’mon,” urged the man through gritted teeth. He was pulling and turning, pulling and turning, and the pain was swelling just like the pressure, and it became almost unbearable, until there was the faintest of clicks, and the joint was cool again.

Marlowe made a sound of triumph and let go of her arm. She folded it across her chest and went to rub at her shoulder with her right hand. The rush of adrenaline and endorphins from the repair was making her dizzy.

“There now, you’re fine. I am sorry I had to do it in the first place, but-”

“Oh, you remember that, do you?” she snapped. She’d gotten what she wanted. She no longer needed to play her part of captive little girl. Step two of the plan was underway.

Marlowe tutted. “Hey now, there’s no reason to be rude.”

Scarlett laughed in his face, sitting up quickly, then standing up, turning around to face them. She was holding the knife that Spade had put on the ground beside them when he’d knelt to hold her. She didn’t reveal it in her hand until both of them had stepped close. With her good arm, she plunged the weapon, a small drop point pocket knife, into the throat of Spade, turning it and slicing sideways. He jerked away, ripping it from his throat, but she had a good grip on it and kept it in her sticky hand. She swung her arm around to catch Marlowe on it too, but he dodged and raised his hands in defense, stepping backwards like a dancer away from her attack. She only managed to cut the front of his forearms, but she hoped the wounds were deep. She was running before she could inspect the damage she’d made.

She made it out the door of the structure and past the car parked just outside. She plunged her knife into the soft sides of the two back tires as she passed, then kept going into the cold night.

The river was right there beside the thin, tree-lined dirt road they’d traveled, shining milky in the moonlight. Everything was black, dark blue, and silver in the wintery air except for her. Her jeans and blood-splattered pale blue T-shirt would stand out if she tried to hide. So she had to run, and run hard.

She’d run track in high school, had qualified for state in college, but never had she had to compete against angry men while suffering crippling bloodloss. It would be a challenge, but never had Shana O’Hara gone up against a challenge unwilling to give it her all. So she ran.


	6. Chapter 6

She followed the river, listening to its gentle, watery sounds along the bank, listening to her short, precise breaths and the pronounced wheeze in her chest. She listened for Marlowe behind her, but either he hadn’t followed, or she just couldn’t hear him. She was willing to bet on which one it was.

The Potomac river flows southeast to the Chesapeake Bay, passing the National Mall in D.C. She didn’t know how closely the road they had taken had stuck to the endless curves and rounding paths the river took, but she knew if she followed it, she would eventually hit more civilization. She wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. No one built a ranger’s station in the middle of the swampy rushes of Washington, D.C. without needing it to be useful to someone. She just didn’t know how many surrounding buildings were possibly owned by the people who had organized the kidnapping. She didn’t know where to go to find friends and not foes. So she followed the river, keeping an eye out for lights that meant buildings, for car headlamps or streetlights or anything.

For the most part, her surroundings were gloomy and quiet, trees stretching out into the distance for as far as she could see in the dark. The ground beneath her running shoes was hard, near frozen by the cold, and the air was getting colder and darker. A quick glance up told her the moon was fading away behind clouds. She remembered the forecast of snow and gritted her teeth.

It was the cold that would be her new enemy in only an hour or two if she didn’t find somewhere safe. Her T-shirt would not do much to protect her from exposure.

She ran for about a mile before feeling a stitch in her side that needed nursing. She slowed to a jog and then a walk, holding her side with her good hand. She kept her left arm tucked against herself, knowing she shouldn’t do much movement with her shoulder until it could be hung in a sling and kept immobile for a while. After a minute or two, she picked her way carefully to the water’s edge, sliding over slick boulders and mud that was still soft from the water’s touch, and dipped her hand in to cup water in her palm. It was barely a slurp, so she had to do it a few times to feel refreshed, but the water was bitterly cold and bracing. She dried her hand on her jeans and tucked her fingers into her sore armpit, needing circulation in them. She wouldn’t be able to shoot properly if she lost a finger to frostbite.

A snapping branch made every tendon in her body stiffen. She was still kneeling by the water. Slowly she stood, staring hard out into the shadowy tree line on the gently sloping dirt around her. She couldn’t hear anything else. After a full minute of horror-movie tension, Scarlett walked back to the relatively flat ground that she’d been following and started on her way again. If it was Marlowe following her, better to continue south, hoping to come across something, than stay here.

She had been jogging at a steady pace for three minutes when her footing stumbled a bit and she came out into asphalt. In the moonless dark, she hadn’t been able to see the break in the trees until she had stepped out into it. There was a path stretching out before her, lined with the broken white line that divides lanes in a road. It was much too small for cars, so it had to be a footpath.

Her heart leapt again, beating hard from the exertion and sudden excitement. _Still alive still alive still alive._ If there was a hiking trail, it would have to lead somewhere. She tore down it in another run, her sneakers slapping the pavement. She was tired and afraid but oh so alive and oh so ready to find someone, anyone, with a phone.

For twenty more minutes she alternated at a half-speed run and a slow jog, her legs going numb from the jolts of her strides. Her fingers, tucked into her sweating armpits, were kept warm, but the rest of her was hard and cold, and she deliriously pictured her skin turning into diamonds. The path had mostly kept close to the river, kissing it gently in some places where she would stop to get another drink, and she followed it faithfully, knowing it would lead her to civilization, soon, soon, soon.

But the longer she went without seeing lights, the longer she went breathing the frigid air into her tired lungs, the longer she went bleeding from wounds innumerable, the less chance she knew she had of surviving the night. She was sweating from the exertion, the worst cause of hypothermia in cold weather, and she was wearing only a T-shirt. She needed shelter. Once the sun rose, the path would fill up with people taking early morning jogs before leaving to go work on Capitol Hill, and they would all, invariably, be carrying a cell phone.

 She couldn’t start a fire, the top survival trick she knew. Marlowe would track the light. She didn’t doubt for one second that he was following her, though how he hadn’t managed to catch up with her yet was beyond her. She was running, but it shouldn’t have been enough to put distance between them if he was determined, and the one thing she was sure about his character was his determination.

Scarlett slowed to a stop. She wiped her forehead and her face with the back of her good hand. She was still holding the knife. This knife would never leave her sight again if she made it through the night. She took quick stock of her surroundings, her eyes narrowed for light, any light, and saw a small crop of big rocks along the eastern side of the path, opposite the river.

She went to it quickly, hoping beyond hope. Sometimes piles of boulders like this hid small inlets or even a shallow cave-like groove. Usually these were occupied by families of raccoons or ground squirrels, but she had a knife and was ready to fight anything that might oppose her gaining entrance to shelter of any kind.

It was a tiny miracle, but a miracle nonetheless. As she got closer, she could see a small dark spot amongst the rocks, even darker than the shadows of the night, and just by looking at it she could tell its depth. The opening was about the height of her knees, just enough for her to squeeze in, and would probably be just enough for her whole body if she tucked in tight.

Scarlett dove her arm with the knife into the blackness, expecting to feel the resistance of fur or possibly teeth biting down across her wrist. When she felt or heard no animals hissing at her, she squirmed into the opening, finding the inside cave larger than she was expecting.  She wiggled on her belly across the rock, gritting her teeth from jostling her injuries, and curled up like an awkward cat once she got to the widest part. When she was settled and almost comfortable among the stone, she thought to herself, “ _If only Tunnel Rat could see me now_ ,” and she had to stifle a guffaw of laughter into her sleeve.

She laid her head on her right arm, her legs drawn up against her sore stomach, her left arm draped in the most comfortable position she could manage. It was about as cramped as a baby in a womb, but once she stopped rustling on the stone and dirt, it was almost warm. She closed her eyes and willed herself to stop shivering.

A sound made her open her eyes again, the telltale gentle whir of rubber tires on asphalt coming from somewhere. She didn’t know how much time had passed, but it felt longer than a few minutes. She pushed away from the warmth her body had created on the stone, wriggling out of the opening and into a semi-darkness that shocked her. It was pre-dawn, one strip of pinkish-yellow brightening the sky behind her, and she realized she must have been near asleep for hours. Her muscles were still aching, especially now that she’d been resting tensed up inside a tiny cave, but her mind was clear, and her bleeding had stopped. She crawled awkwardly across the boulders again, minding her left arm, and stood in the middle of the pathway, surprised by how much she could see, even in the dim light. She could still hear the sound, so she began walking, rounding a curve the trail made and colliding with a man on a bicycle.

Scarlett cried out in surprise. The man gasped and went down, but popped back up quickly, holding an elbow.

“Are you all right?” he asked at first, then gasped, “Holy shit, you’re _bleeding_ -!” then grunted in alarm when she rushed him, covering his mouth with her good hand.

“Quiet!” she whispered fiercely. “There’s someone following me. Do you have a cell phone?”

Wordlessly, his eyes wide above her hand, he nodded. She took her hand away from his mouth.

“Who’s following you?” he asked in his own whisper as he brought his hands to the small of his back where a cycling pack was snug against his spine. He was wearing the skintight clothing of a cyclist, his calf and thigh muscles bulging. Scarlett watched his motions, knowing his hands could come back with anything other than a cell phone, and snatched at the device when he brought it around and held it out to her.

“Quiet,” she said again. “He has a gun.”

“A gun- ?!”

Scarlett shushed him and turned around to watch the path behind her as she brought the phone to her ear. She’d dialed Duke’s cell phone. She prayed it would connect.

“Where are we?” she asked the cyclist as the connection clicked.

“Potomac.”

That was in Maryland, about twelve miles from her apartment. They hadn’t taken her far.

“Hello?”

“Duke.”

“ _Scarlett_!”

“Duke, let me talk this time. The city of Potomac, along the footpath on the eastern border of the Potomac River. I killed one but the other is following me. I’m with a civ, and I’m going to continue south. Get a huey with a spotlight and a damn good marksman.”

“On it. Are you hurt?”

Scarlett hesitated, then said, “Yeah. But mobile. We’ll try to go as far as possible.”

“Wild Bill’s in the air already, and we’re headed your way. You said a footpath?”

“Small one, along the river. Have him follow the water.”

“We’ll find you, Scarlett.”

She hesitated again, then asked, “Is Snake Eyes alive?”

“Yes.”

Tears came to her eyes unbidden. It had been a bad night for crying. She wiped them away with the back of the hand holding the phone and brought it back to her ear. “Critical?”

“Stable. Just a scratch on his head and a mildly cracked skull. He’s already at Bethesda.”

“Stupid ass,” she muttered tearfully, full of joy.

“We’re coming, Scarlett. Hang on, okay?”

“Copy. Duke, wait. He’s out for you.”

“I know.”

“So don’t make yourself a target.”

“Copy, Lieutenant. See you soon.”

She hung up and turned to the bewildered man on the bicycle, pocketing his phone. “You need to get out of here. It’s not safe.”

“I have pepper spray,” the man said hesitantly.

“Turn around and go. Now.”

He didn’t move. “There’s someone after you.”

As if in response, Scarlett looked over her shoulder and began to jog away, knowing the man would follow. He did, balancing on his bike like a pro, even with the slow pace he needed to maintain to stay at her speed. She immediately broke into a run, leading him back down the way he’d come. She was the Pied Piper of idiot cyclists.

“Who is after you?” he asked her above the whir of his tires.

“Don’t know,” she answered, wondering why the hell she did at all. She needed her breath, and she needed to split from this dead weight. It wasn’t good to have hangers-on that she couldn’t protect. Hell, she only had one good arm and no blasters and no gun. Even one of Snake’s katana would be preferable to the measly pocket knife she had in her jeans pocket.

“Why does he want to kill you?”

“Don’t know. Shut up and go.”

The man seemed infuriatingly relaxed and at ease as he did the bicycle equivalent to a stroll beside her.

“Can you fit two people on that?” she demanded, slowing to a stop and turning to him.

“It’s not a mountain bike,” he said uncertainly. “I don’t-”

A gunshot blasted in the night air, as loud as a firework and close as sin. Scarlett dove for the brush alongside the footpath, dragging the man down by his shirt collar. To his credit he didn’t struggle or make a sound, but he had squealed his bike’s breaks when the gunshot had gone off.

She waited for more, or for Marlowe to call out at her. She had a feeling he was stereotypical like that, a villain taunting the good guy out of hiding. The night was silent again save for a dog barking in the far distance. Scarlett and the stranger were half-concealed by cold, dewy bushes. Slowly, she realized it could have been a firecracker set off by delinquent kids or a car backfiring. She was jumpy. All explosions sounded alike when you were as high-strung as she was at the moment. When there were no more sounds for a full uncomfortable minute, she stood and dragged him up again.

“You need to get out of here _now_. This isn’t a game. Go back to your house and call the cops,” she said, her hand still clutching his tight spandex shirt.

“I’m not leaving you out here alone,” he said stubbornly. He was an average-looking man, but his bravery made him shine.

“I appreciate that, but I’m U.S. Army. I can handle myself.”

“You’re hurt, you’re bleeding a shit-ton, and it’s dark out. I’m staying here. Call the cops from my cell phone that you still have.”

Scarlett was ready to punch him. She was ready to insult him. She was ready to do anything to turn him against her, make him grumble and speed away, nursing _something_ bruised, be it jaw or ego.

“Why are you even out here this early?” she snapped finally, for lack of a better argument. They were out in the open, not moving, and she was making a pitifully easy target, but she was feeling the exhaustion catching up to her. Stopping to talk to the stranger was giving her a chance to catch her breath and steel herself for what was going to come next, whatever it was. She was wise enough to admit that her energy reserves were near tapped out, but she was stubborn enough to assume all she had to do was rest for a few minutes before she would be good to go again. The catnap in the rocks had only recharged so much, and her adrenaline was back up again now that she had to protect this idiot man, as well.

“I work an early shift,” said the man, answering as easily as if they were making small talk on a first date. “I bike around beforehand because it’s peaceful and there’s no one else and it’s better when the sun’s not up. Fair skin.” He gestured to his face.

Scarlett was half-listening. She was scanning the sky ahead for Wild Bill in his Blackhawk, scanning the tree line behind them for Marlowe, and thinking about Snake Eyes being alive. She could hardly believe it. She’d known the gun had been aiming at his head. She had been sure he’d died instantly, bullet to the brain, boom, no defense. She’d been ready to kill Marlowe for that alone.

“What’s your name?” she asked, coming back around to the man.

“Miller.”

“Miller, I appreciate you-”

“Stop it,” he said calmly. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with you until your friends show up.”

Scarlett glared at him. “Stay ahead of me, at least,” she said, pushing him in front of her and starting to walk again. It felt good to be moving, even at this snail’s pace. The trail in front of them was wide and empty and dark.

Miller pushed his bike beside him, repeatedly glancing back at her. She was checking their surroundings constantly, never keeping her gaze on one spot for too long before letting it slide over into the next bit of horizon. The knife was back in her good hand. Her shoulder was throbbing, but her arm was still pressed tightly to her chest, her left hand gripping a handful of her shirt to anchor it. She’d forgotten how blood-stained it was until Miller had mentioned it. She wondered what her face looked like and decided she would save that until a plastic surgeon at the hospital could look her over. If she had any facial fractures, she would go ballistic.

Theoretically, she thought she’d have some warning before Marlowe could jump out at them, because the ground was covered in dead leaves and thin twigs, and the path behind was wide and straight enough to see for several yards, and she was concentrating with all her might for a visual or auditory clue, but even with her years of training and field expertise, she was still a beaten and bloody soldier with a civilian to protect, and it wasn’t as easy as the manuals led you to believe, so it was a surprise when Marlowe was all of a sudden there beside them. His mask was off but she knew it was him; the cold, shrewd gleam in his eye spoke of cartoonish villainy.

She pushed Miller away from her, making him stumble forward and grunt. She didn’t make a sound, just leveled a powerful haymaker at the man that was blocked and countered like she was in seventh grade and just starting out with her kickboxing classes. Marlowe landed a crippling blow against the side of her jaw, the same place that had been the first injury of the night in the fight back at her apartment, and she cried out and went down. The man fell on top of her, probably seeing an easy win.

He seemed to forget about the mysterious masked ninja who had walked into her apartment without knocking, that Scarlett O’Hara was a US Army soldier at the peak of her physical prowess who obviously had a relationship with a skilled assassin. Scarlett curled and rolled and grappled, ignoring the shrieking pain in her left shoulder as she held and squeezed. She wound her limbs around his and pulled tight while they were both lying on their sides facing each other, trying to roll on top to complete a choke once he was incapacitated. If she could get her good arm around his neck, she would battle the injury in her other shoulder to do a triangle hold and end this for good, using a blood choke that would kill the man in a minute.

Ground techniques were nearly impossible to do with a weakened limb, though, and she was overpowered as he squirmed and countered, pressing against pressure points and using his strength against hers. Her face was buried into Marlowe’s side while her legs and his legs were intertwined like ribbons, both of them curled into half-moon shapes and scraping their cheeks against the pavement.

Then he yelled in her ear suddenly, startling her, and began to pull away from her grip around his upper torso. She resisted until she saw the reason why in the dark: Miller had buried the short pocket knife into Marlowe’s back. He was standing over the two of them with his eyes as wide as goose eggs, his mouth open at his brazenness.

Marlowe roared and slid an arm out of Scarlett’s grip to claw at the knife. Scarlett pushed off the asphalt and rolled the two of them around so that they were lying on their opposite sides, she leaning on her left, he on his right, pinning the arm he’d been using to get the knife out. Her legs were still wrapped tight around his thighs, her ankles anchoring them, keeping him down. She was panting from the pain of her shoulder, more and more convinced she was doing irreparable damage with every passing moment, but she had to survive the next few minutes in order to find out.

She struggled with him for a moment in a sort of stalemate, both of them caught in a limbo of strength and weakness. Miller was standing stock-still beside them, watching with fear as they wrestled on the ground. The knife was still in Marlowe’s back. Her left arm was useless and weak with pain, pressed to the ground beside Marlowe’s right one.

With a another animal roar that caught her attention but moved past her speed of reaction, the man threw himself up to his knees, dragging Scarlett with him as she clung to him like a koala on a tree trunk. He untangled his legs from hers, pushing her face backwards so hard she thought her neck would break. She let go and found her footing underneath her, bringing her hands up in front of her defensively as she stumbled backwards a few steps to regain balance.

Marlowe had already grabbed the knife from himself. He turned to Miller.

“Don’t-!” she screamed, lunging for him.

He went straight for the innocent cyclist who didn’t know how to counter knife attacks, who didn’t know self-defense, who didn’t have the self-preservation to get away when she’d told him to. Scarlett wrapped an arm around the throat of the man just as he stuck the weapon deep between Miller’s ribs, who made an awful sound and fell backwards. Scarlett tried to complete the choke she’d started too late to save the brave man who had refused to leave her side, but Marlowe was motivated by adrenaline now, energized by his battle win. He turned to her, breaking her choke hold, and began to hit over and over again, on her abdomen where it would hurt but not win the fight, his hand gripping a handful of her hair and shirt to keep her trapped. Each blow hurt worse than the one before it. Over and over again. He was prolonging it.

She got away from him with a kick that doubled him over, holding his groin and coughing, and went around him to the cyclist. Miller was gasping and holding the wound, his fingers spread wide in the patch of blood on his yellow and black cycling jersey. He looked at her. She didn’t look back. “Keep pressure on it,” she said, touching the knife but not pulling it out. It would be worse for him if she did, as it was staunching most of the bleeding, but she needed the weapon. There had been a gun, she remembered, a gun Marlowe had used to try and kill her friend and a gun he had knocked her out with and a gun that he must still have on his person, but she needed the knife and then the Joes were coming, that sound in the distance was the helicopter, whump whump whump in the distance as the blade rotors sliced the freezing dawn air. A second pattern of the same thick sounds came after that, and she nearly sighed in relief – they would outnumber the man several to one.

Scarlett stood over Miller’s body on the ground as Marlowe turned finally, straightening up from the agony in his groin. He was panting and laughing at the same time. The sound of the helicopter wasn’t in her hopeful imagination; it would arrive there any moment.

“Get on the ground,” she commanded in a voice that wasn’t really commanding.

He smirked at her and raised his hands in the universal pose of ‘don’t shoot’. He didn’t even look up at the hueys as they came down in a precise, controlled descent behind Scarlett, her hair whipping around her face and striking the abrasions on her cheeks with stinging retorts. She was trembling, both from her exhaustion of the night and from the force of the winds coming off the helicopters’ rotors, but she stood straight and tall, her gaze locked with that of the man’s.

Joes poured from the side of the hueys like ants charging out of an anthill; suddenly they were all around her, pulling her backwards, forming human shields between her and the enemy. All she could see were the colors and textures of her teammates’ assortment of uniforms as she was swept backwards in the current. They were shouting over each other, but she could hear Duke’s voice above the rest, ordering the man to get on the ground, do it, do it now, on the ground now, and that’s when she remembered, and she screamed, “Wait!”

Gunfire erupted in the dawn stillness, cracking louder than the helicopters’ engines, echoing over the swampy land around the river and the wilderness beyond. Scarlett ducked instinctively and then grabbed at the weapon Law threw her: her blaster with the crossbow attachment, fitting in her hands like a gauntlet or a second skin. She pushed past the Joes around her and found Duke reeling backwards from a wound in his chest at the front of the pack.

“Idiot,” she snarled at him through gritted teeth, pulling his torso back into her chest, folding her arms around him. Other Joes were reacting to wounds, both theirs and those of their teammates. Calls for medics swarmed the frosty air.

Marlowe lay dead on the footpath, peppered with blaster and bullet wounds both. Some of his skin was smoking from the heat of the Cobra issue weapons that GI Joe had adopted out of spite. Scarlett let Duke fall to the asphalt and inspected him. There was no blood.

“Idiot!” she cried at him as the others moved around them in a practiced, efficient dance of responsibilities. Lifeline and Doc were hurrying up through the swarm, triaging their patients. “I told you he was coming for you, remember?”

“I’m all right,” Duke grinned at her. His head was lying against her thighs, looking up into her face. His expression changed. “You’re not.” He sat up and put both hands on her shoulders. “Doc, over here!”

Scarlett wiped her face with her good hand and let her head hang as Doc skidded up to them and began to poke and prod at her. “Is anyone else dead?” she asked Duke, who was an idiot who was perfectly fine because the bullet had bounced off his Kevlar.

“None of us,” said Duke. He stood and scanned the crowd. There had to be at least ten different Joes who had come to her rescue. If any of them had been killed in a shootout with Marlowe, she would never be able to forgive herself. “None of us, Scarlett, we’re all fine. You need to get to a hospital.”

Scarlett made a noise of argument but Doc overrode her right there, forcing her back into a supine position on the cold ground. The sky overhead was brightening from the sunrise, but it was covered in thick, gray clouds. She remembered that it was supposed to snow.

“We have a medevac coming for you, Scarlett,” Doc murmured over her as he was taking her vitals. She saw that he wasn’t meeting her eyes. She wondered if her face was beyond repair.

“Duke, there are more of them,” she called to him, because he had walked out of her line of vision as she gazed up into the sky. He came back and leaned over her. His eyebrows were knit low, concern clouding the blue of his eyes. He wouldn’t look at her face either.

“We know. We’ve been digging all night.”

“Is the civ all right?”

He looked up and away to where Miller had fallen. She could hear her teammates talking around them. “He’s all right. Lifeline is with him. You’re both all right.”

Scarlett closed her eyes. “They wanted you, but Snake Eyes interrupted the plan-”

“We _know_ , Scarlett. Snake told us. You need to let us take charge for once.”

She smirked in a sardonic grimace that was probably neither amusing nor attractive, what with the rainbow of injuries across her cheeks and lips. “Somebody’s gotta take care of you grunts.”

“For once, Lieutenant, we are absolutely one hundred percent taking care of you.”


	7. Chapter 7

When the medevac helicopter came, they loaded her just as the first dusting of snowflakes began to accumulate on the ground around her. Paramedics in clean white uniforms and practiced hands strapped her to a body board and lifted her to the floor of the huey as they took vitals and spoke to her. She responded as best she could, but her tunnel vision hadn’t improved, and she didn’t remember any of the flight once they got to the hospital. Later, she would figure that was for the best.

Doc stayed with her for the ride and the whole time they worked over her in the ER. Doc, real name Carl Greer, was one of the first friends they had made on the road after going on the run. He had followed their story closely, and near the end he’d re-enlisted in the Army as a medic just so he could work with the GI Joe team that was in the process of being formed by General Abernathy. Since then, he’d been the premiere medical professional of the entire unit, supervising an extensive team of soldier and civilian personnel in his med ward in the Pit, and had grown close with each and every Joe that came his way. He was a big black man with a faint lilt of South Africa in his accent, and he had some of the best bedside manner the Army had to offer. He was fiercely protective of his soldiers and therefore quite stubborn when it came to their care, and many a Joe had come under his disapproving glare when they didn’t follow his advice and instructions to the letter.

It took the better part of two hours for her to get cleaned up in the ER and evaluated for any residual injuries. She was diagnosed with a concussion, two cracked ribs, a bruised spleen and trachea, a loose molar, and various cuts and bruises that needed stitches and cleaning. Her dislocated shoulder was easily the worse injury she had sustained, and she came very close to needing surgery on the strained ligaments that connected the bones of the joint. Luckily, Doc came through and took over duties as her attending, noting in her file that she would go through physical therapy and a long-term use of a restraining sling to keep the arm immobilized against her body. The CT scans had shown a few very minor internal bleeds that would clear up with time, so they didn’t need to go into her belly, either, for which she was immensely grateful. No surgery meant that she could stay on light-active duty at the Pit while her shoulder healed.

Several of her Joe teammates joined her in the ER and the recovery room she was sent to afterwards. They filled her in on what exactly had happened. GI Joe had scrambled when her emergency beacon had gone off, landing on the roof of her apartment building forty-two minutes after the signal. They’d found Snake Eyes alive but in shock on the floor of her kitchen, clutching her radio. He had signed to Doc most of what he knew, then wrote down the rest when Doc and Lifeline had discovered the bullet wound on his skull and had begun to stitch it up. Then they’d been forced to wait, so while the doctors had gotten Snake to the Army hospital and Army CID came to close off her apartment as a crime scene, Duke and his team had gone up with Wild Bill to scan the area, looking for any trouble. A second huey with a second team of Joes had joined them, adding to the manpower, and the full staff back at Control in the heart of GI Joe HQ had done digital recon. The field teams had been over Georgetown when Scarlett had finally called, a short flight away from finding them on the footpath.

Marlowe was officially dead. His body had been flown to the morgue in the same hospital to undergo a criminal autopsy, the beginning of the investigation into his and his fellows’ operation. He had carried no form of ID. They had no way of getting to the rest of the shadowy figures of the organization. Several hours after being rescued, Scarlett gave a hospital bed testimony to Army CID investigators who came to collect evidence and to take her account of her movements. She had to answer to every action she had taken since being taken into unwilling custody of enemies of the state. The two grim-faced, crisply-outfitted men had left without answering her questions, but it had seemed to her like they had about as much information as she did. It was frustrating. Since the elite team GI Joe had formed, they’d enjoyed an almost-unbroken streak of wins against their enemies, Zarana being the one foe they had not managed to defeat in the months since the unit’s formation. It was difficult to swallow a loss, especially a loss against an unknown person who would have eventually provided clues for the motivations behind everything.

Miller was still alive. That had been her first question once she’d woken up after the brief unconsciousness she’d experienced in the ER. He was in his own room somewhere in the same public hospital, but while she was up and walking and talking, he was in an ICU room with no visitors. She’d asked to see him, then demanded, then been nearly restrained before accepting the ‘no’ she was given.

For the rest of the day, Scarlett dozed in her hospital bed. The stress of the whole incident had her mentally and physically worn to pieces, and it felt nice to be in a private room, knowing her fellow soldiers were standing guard just outside in case the mysterious operatives decided they wanted to try another go at her. She stayed in the bed for almost the entire day, letting the mild sedative and painkiller they were administering to her through the IV line drip into her vein. She hadn’t allowed them to give her morphine, as per usual, so she kept a clear head even as she was nestled off to artificial sleep. It was better than the potential hallucinations and night terrors that could possibly be waiting for her. It would be a long road to recovery, she knew. The dreaded term ‘PTSD’ had already floated into her mind once or twice, making her almost as afraid as she’d been while tied to the chair in that shack.

By nightfall, she was alert and hungry and needed to pee. She climbed out of the bed with difficulty, moving like an old woman. It almost hurt to move more now than it had the night before, when she was fighting and wrestling and being struck over and over with fists. She wheeled her IV stand into the bathroom with her and did her business with the light off. After she washed her hands, she realized she hadn’t looked at herself yet. She closed the door to the bathroom and switched on the light, then untied the loose knots of the strings at the back of her hospital gown, letting the thin fabric slide against her skin to puddle on the tile at her feet.

Her flat stomach was an ocean of dark purple, especially in the middle where Marlowe had hit her over and over again right after stabbing Miller. She had a red and black welt on her thigh but couldn’t remember where it had come from. Other bruises were easy to identify, as if they were tagged with the moment they’d been inflicted. Her ribcage was torn up on the sides, especially on the left side where the two cracked ribs were, and there was a pink necklace of irritation around her entire throat.

Her face was bad. She’d been expecting bad, but this was worse. She was shocked Duke, Doc, and the doctors in the emergency room had been able to look at her without flinching.

Both eyes were swollen and plum-purple, the left one worse with the thin strips of medical tape holding together the laceration that had opened up on her eyebrow. Her jawline was red and purple, again worse on the left side. All three kidnappers had been right handed and had punched more with their dominant hand. There were smaller cuts across her fat lips and cheekbones that were scabbing over. A quarter-sized lump was growing underneath her hair near the crown of her head where she’d been pistol-whipped.

She spread her fingers to look at both hands. Her knuckles were cut and scraped to hell. One fingernail had been cracked down to the nail bed, and it stung annoyingly.

All in all, she looked bad, but she was willing to bet it had been worse before nurses had washed all the blood away. At least now she could see the true extent of everything. And, now that she thought about it, most of her injuries were superficial and would heal in a week or two, the bruises fading long before the two worst ones: the shoulder and the ribs. And thank god she hadn’t had any brain trauma or lasting internal damage other than the bruised spleen. The doctors had praised her ability to defend herself, owing her relative “good health” to her ability to match and deflect, to roll with the punches, and listen to her body. She knew it was just luck.

When she came out of the bathroom, dressed again in her hospital gown, she was more energized than she’d been since touching down at the airport the day before. She went to the small dresser beneath the window that looked out into the darkening gray of the twilight and found the small grocery bag of clothes that Cover Girl and Lady Jaye had retrieved for her that morning. Her apartment was a crime scene being guarded by Metro police and Army CID, but her two teammates had finagled their way in to grab a few outfits from her bedroom for her to change into when she would be released the next day. The plan was for her to fly back to the Pit in the morning, give her official statement to the higher-ups by satellite conference, and then recuperate under Doc’s care for an indeterminate amount of time in the medical ward. She had asked that they not alert her father to the incident until well after she was back in the safety of the hidden and underground HQ, far from his or anyone else’s grasp. He would not be good in an emergency such as this, and she didn’t want him to see her with these injuries either. She had been overjoyed to see him alive and well when he’d come back from the M.A.S.S. device wormhole, but the hurt from all the years before had not healed overnight either. There was a sort of distance between them that she had been working to close, hence the trip she had just taken to see him. To have to deal with his nursing after she had just spent a few days with him in Atlanta would be overkill.

She dressed in a pair of soft, old yoga pants, shockingly glad that she had asked her closest female teammates to do the clothes retrieval, and strapped a loose cotton bra on over the brace she was wearing for her shoulder. It was made of thick neoprene and elastic, wrapped in a sleeve-shape over her upper arm, with a band that wound across her collarbones and under her opposite armpit above her breasts. It was uncomfortably tight, but it immobilized the injured joint from moving. She was able to rotate her elbow up and down in its normal 90 degree angle, but she couldn’t move the rest of her arm. It was like her upper arm was glued to her ribs. Luckily, the bra they had grabbed for her clasped in the front, eliminating the difficulty she’d have with a normal one, and she made a mental note to buy Courtney and Allison gift baskets. When she’d struggled herself into a long-sleeve shirt and reconnected the IV, she went to the door of the hospital room and found Tripwire and Duke on guard duty.

“What are you doing?” they asked her together when they’d both turned in surprise to see her up and dressed. The IV line hung down from the metal stand and disappeared under the hem of her sleeve around her hand.

“What are _you_ doing?” she countered at Duke. “You should be under protection as well, not guarding me.”

“Trip is here, and three more Joes are in the entry room downstairs, pretending to be visitors,” Duke said. He looked angry, angrier than she’d been expecting in reaction to her slight rebellion. She remembered his melancholy after Roadblock’s near-drowning outside Scotland and was irritated that he couldn’t hold himself together a second time. It’s not like either of them had actually died.

“I need to go see the autopsy results for the kidnapper,” she said. She’d told the investigators the names Marlowe had suggested for them, but it felt silly saying them out loud now.

“They haven’t done the autopsy yet, Scarlett,” said Tripwire. He was a young, eager specialist who Duke had known before the fall of Cobra. Duke had asked for him to join up with the unit when it was forming, and he’d taken the kid under his wing. Scarlett had armchair-psychologist diagnosed him with replacing Vince, his wayward, angry little brother, with another younger, slightly helpless kid. The two even sort of looked alike. She’d never said anything to him about it. It seemed cruel.

“I still want to go look at him.” She tried crossing her arms in front of her chest in one of her signature moves of authority, forgetting about the sling. The gesture of command backfired spectacularly when Duke and Tripwire exchanged a glance after she couldn’t move her useless left arm.

“Get back into the bed, Scarlett. You’re going to rip out some stitches or something.”

“I don’t have any stitches that I could rip,” she said angrily, being backed into the room by them.

“Stay here. You can boss us around tomorrow. Give it at least one day.”

“Like you did over the summer?” she retorted, knowing she had lost, knowing he knew. Duke grinned at her and shut the door. She could see their silhouettes in the small glass window.

She cursed under her breath. Something wasn’t sitting right, and the energy that she was feeling was bolstering that unease. She paced a few steps, her bare feet slapping accusingly on the cold linoleum. The IV stand she was carrying along with her squeaked on its hard rubber wheels.

There was a tap at the window. She jerked, almost screamed, and was glad that she caught herself. There was no reason to come out of this experience jumpy. She would have to retrain a few of her baser instincts. She was still a soldier, damnit. She was still strong and level-headed.

It was only a few short steps to the window, which she took with confidence. If it was Marlowe come back from the dead, or any of the other men from the shady operation, she could have Duke and Tripwire firing their blasters in here in seconds. She could hold any attacker off for at least a few seconds. She undid the latch and slid the glass open sideways, trying to do it as carefully as possible so that her guardians in the hall wouldn’t hear. There was a second possibility as to the source of the tap, and she wanted privacy if her guess turned out to be true.

Snake Eyes crawled through the open window and into her arms, as fluid as smoke and quick as a viper. She didn’t even have time to breathe before he had come fully through the opening and was embracing her, both arms wrapped tight around her. She flinched a bit and he pulled away immediately, but she kept him from moving too far with her good arm around his waist.

“You’re okay,” she sighed. She’d known it since Duke had told her over the phone, but it hadn’t seemed real until now. “What took you so long?”

It was a joke, but his head hung a bit lower than normal. “I’m kidding,” she said, touching his cheek. “I’m just glad you’re all right. Bullet to the head is rough.”

He cupped her head in his hands. Behind his visor, she knew he was taking in every bump, scrape, and cut on her face. She didn’t want to pull away, but she didn’t want him seeing her like this. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said. “I’m fine.”

He embraced her in a tight hug again, this time avoiding the left side that he’d probably noticed she was favoring. She leaned into it. She could feel his heartbeat against her chest. _Still alive. Still alive. Still alive._ It made her dizzy with the thought of what could have been. She pushed him away again.

“What kind of idiot brings a katana to a gun fight?” she demanded. “You could have at least killed the guy with the gun first! So much for being my hero, getting your head blown off while I get-” She trailed off, knowing she was going too far with the teasing but genuine frustration. She touched his skull, where a flash of white was peeking out through a tear in the mask. “Take care of yourself, too, Snake Eyes,” she muttered. “You’re no good to me dead.”

He rubbed his sternum with a closed fist. ‘Sorry’.

“I know,” she groused. “I just don’t know what I’d do without you. It’s been you and me for so long. I can’t imagine having to carry on without you.”

His hand made the ‘Y’ shape, thumb and pinkie extended with the middle fingers curled, and swung his hand back and forth, pointing his thumb at himself and his pinkie at her. ‘Me too’.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess we’re stuck with each other.”

His head tilted a bit. She wondered if he was smiling. Sometimes it felt like he was, like when she made a joke at one of their teammate’s expenses and they stood together, her chuckling, him silent as a shadow.

She wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck and squeezed. “I’m so glad you’re all right. I was going crazy in that chair.”

Snake Eyes looked at her behind the mask. His hand slid down her bad arm, tracing the bump of the neoprene brace beneath her shirt and then the raised round tube of the IV when his fingers got to the back of her hand. The injection site stung when he disturbed it, but she loved his touch so much that she didn’t say anything. They touched fairly frequently, little taps or shoulder-touches or moments of action where they had to rest in each other’s arms, but this touch had much more weight to it, and she was breathlessly aware of it. She also realized the reference to being tied up was lost on him, a bare allusion to what had happened to her in the hours that they’d been apart. She’d had to relive it while speaking to the investigators, but with them her report had been clinical, detached, emotionless. She had spoken as if it hadn’t even been her being tortured for information.

Scarlett closed her swollen eyes. She was composing herself. She had cried in front of him only once, and then she hadn’t actually let any tears fall. She would be damned if she would do it tonight, on a night where she was weakest. His fingers went to her face again, and she leaned her cheek into the touch. “I was scared,” she whispered, and his hand went away. “It was bad, Snake Eyes.”

When she opened her eyes, she saw he had pulled up the bottom half of his mask, revealing his mouth and chin. She went to say something, but he put his hands on her jaw and pulled her in gently.

She kissed him gingerly, minding the injuries on her mouth and the fact that this was brand new for both of them. She’d seen his lips before, had even seen his face years before the rest of her teammates, but they had never kissed. Not once. She leaned into it, her eyes closing again, taking in his sounds and smells and touch. They kissed for a long time, or for what felt like a long time. His mouth was surprisingly clumsy, at odds with the man she knew as even-keeled and skilled at almost everything he attempted. Then she thought, ‘Well of course he hasn’t practiced this much,’ and she pressed against him, her bad arm holding his ribs, her good arm thrown around his neck and pulling his height down to her. Their breath mingled in each other’s mouths. She flicked her tongue at his lips, telling them to widen, and he obliged. She was in control which felt so good, so, so good after the night she’d had. When they finally broke apart she had to keep herself from giggling.

“What was that for?” she asked, instead going for the bossy lieutenant persona she’d perfected over the years.

His mouth twisted in a smirk. She grinned back, triumphantly learning that he did, indeed, have the sense of humor she had always pegged him as having. No one could be that stoic, especially around the other Joes who joked and kidded with each other like it was their job.

She reached up to roll the spandex back down, patting it into place at the invisible seam where it hit the neckpiece of his suit, avoiding his scar. “That was fun, but it’s not really time for that. I have a job for you.”

He moved his head to the side. She pictured a raised eyebrow and low eyelids with a sort of thrill in her stomach and had to banish the thought.

“Joes killed the leader when they found me by the river, but I am having a bad feeling. I just tried to get past Duke and Tripwire outside, but they wouldn’t let me through. I need you to go down to the morgue and look at the body. Take pictures. I need to see him.”

When he didn’t move, Scarlett reached out to touch his upper arm, right at the hard muscle of his bicep. “I know you want me to rest, but I won’t stop worrying.”

This seemed to convince him. He went to the window, climbing over the dresser beneath it as silent as a shadow. She stopped him with a little intake of breath. He glanced over his shoulder, paused in the contortion of his body as it was in the process of stepping out into a sheer four-story drop.

“Thank you. For… for everything. For just now.”

He nodded once and was gone.

She buried her face in her hands, hissing at the sting of her touch and the movement it inspired. It wasn’t time to dive into her own head, but she was feeling the need to analyze the kiss. The kiss and the motivations behind it. They had been teammates for years; in fact it was the longest relationship she’d ever had with anyone, nearly including her father since he’d been so distant after her mother died when she was a child.  They had watched each other’s backs, patched each other’s wounds, and gotten each other through some of the darkest periods of their lives, up to and including the wayward year of the Joes, when it was their familiarity and in-sync working styles that had been the foundation of keeping the newly-formed team together. But never, in all the years and painful situations and close calls of death, had they kissed or even expressed the kind of affection and intimacy that a kiss implied. They had slept in the same bed without touching; they had undressed and shown each other the barest of their bodies without lust. She’d seen his face only once, in a scary moment when she’d nearly lost him, and they had never spoken about it afterwards. She learned sign language to communicate with him and he stuck with the Joes when they became her new family, but their relationship had never really been defined by either of them as anything other than working. Of course, after she and her teammates had regained the public’s love once Cobra’s dealings were revealed, including the information that Snake Eyes was much more involved in her life than she’d even known, they’d both had to redefine everything that they expected of each other. Snake told her in a long, rambling, written story of how he’d known her way before she had known him, culminating in the night when he’d saved her from the Cobra assassins back when she was still a lowly newly-commissioned officer working in Intelligence in D.C. She remembered the incident well and couldn’t believe her naiveté, that she’d just let this masked stranger into her home and heart. But something about Snake Eyes had drawn her to him, just as he did to this day, and she had never questioned it.

The kiss was something else. This was a breach into new territory that she hadn’t plotted or planned out. Of course, she had thought about a ‘what if’ once or twice, and in a secret she would never, ever tell a soul, she had once fantasized about kissing him, but never had she imagined that she would actually be kissing this man who had been her partner, her teammate, her spiritual guide, for so long. It terrified her that their relationship would change. It terrified her that she might lose him one day and suddenly be deprived of not only a teammate but now a lover. Losing Joes was the hardest thing she had come up against since the unit had formed; losing Snake Eyes would be like losing the ability to breathe.

She didn’t want him as a boyfriend, that much was clear. She wasn’t even certain he would _be_ like a boyfriend. He still kept secrets from her; sometimes he didn’t answer when she asked questions, and he went off on his own for days or weeks at a time more often now that she was working at the Pit rather than traipsing across the country in an armored truck. But the kiss had been wonderful, just what she’d needed, and she wouldn’t mind doing it again.

First things first, however. He would be back any moment now with information that she needed to clear her suspicions or confirm her worst nightmare, and that was the thing that she concentrated the most on once she got the idea of Snake Eyes as a boyfriend out of the way. She even giggled to herself, picturing him on the other side of a candlelit dinner with a bowtie beneath his mask. Then she set herself to the mission at hand: keeping herself and her fellow Joes in the capital safe from the unknown and extremely dangerous enemy that had had the audacity to strike at the heart of the unit. Once he came back, she would need to set off on phase two of the recovery from this incident: payback.


	8. Chapter 8

Snake was back at her window in less than a half hour. Scarlett got up from the bed where she’d been reclined, fighting hard to stay awake past the exhaustion, and greeted him at the window with her hands out for his phone. He gave it to her and waited as she scrolled through the pictures. His faceless mask betrayed nothing about what he’d found, even if he had known what to look for.

He’d been thorough, at least. She had done well to send him rather than go herself. The disconnect of seeing the man’s body in pictures, lying dead and pale and livid with pooling blood, was more than enough for her. She picked through each one, each far away shot of his body, including his naked groin and legs, each close up of his features and injured extremities. His face was still unfamiliar, as unfamiliar as it had been while she was confronting him on the bike path beside the river, and that uneasy feeling was not going away. Of course, she had not seen Marlowe’s face at all during the time in the ranger’s station, but some small part of her told her that she would still recognize him now as she was looking at his dead body in the morgue.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” she murmured, going back to the beginning of the pictures and scrolling through them again. “It’s him, it must be him, but–”

She stopped. She stared. Snake Eyes leaned in to see what had captured her attention. He must have heard the quickening of her heartbeat. _Stillalivestillalivestill..._

She slipped over her own feet and the cord connecting her to the IV pole, but she made it to the hospital door fast enough that even the ninja was a few steps behind. “Duke!” she cried as she opened the door again. “Trip! It’s not him!”

Both soldiers guarding her door seemed to be ready for her. They were facing the door when it opened, and Duke was shaking his head. “Scarlett, get back in the bed,” he commanded angrily, speaking over her, pushing his way past the doorframe and into the room, backing her up. He laid a hand on her shoulder to steady her as she backpedaled, overwhelmed and dizzy by what she’d figured out. There was no time. They had to move.

“Sergeant Hauser, listen,” she said, holding out the phone with her good arm. Duke was still holding her shoulder as he backed her up. Snake Eyes stepped out of the shadows of the dark room and touched the soldier’s hand lightly. Duke let go.

“Where’d you get those?” asked Tripwire, who was leaning in to see what she was waving under Duke’s nose.

“Snake took them five minutes ago. Duke, it’s not him. It’s not the man who was in my apartment. This is someone else, a different operative. He was wearing the same outfit but he didn’t have the mask, they wanted to pass him off as the mark of the operation while the main guy got away. He was a dupe, sent to us for an easy kill to throw us off their tracks.”

“If he was wearing a mask–”

“I cut his arms when I escaped, right at the front,” she said, indicating where on Snake Eyes, who was standing beside her, motionless, his mask facing Duke. “But this guy doesn’t have those slashes. It’s not him. Which means he’s still out there.”

Duke took the phone from her and looked at the picture she had stopped on. She watched his pale blue eyes as they flitted over the picture and took in what he was seeing in relation to what she was saying. Then he handed the phone back and pressed the communicator in his ear.

Scarlett took a breath and gave the phone back to Snake. Adrenaline was pumping into her limbs again. It felt good to be doing something, but a secret dread was also wounding its way around her heart. How many more people would die before the night was over?

“Affirm,” Duke was saying quietly. “Target is active and location is undetermined. Permission to begin aerial surveillance.”

“What the hell are you doing?!”

Tripwire and Duke raised their weapons, whirling around, but lowered them again as Doc stormed into the room. “Get back in bed, Lieutenant, or I swear to god I will handcuff you there. And you! I left you unconscious!” This he directed to Snake Eyes, who crossed his arms in front of his chest.

“Doc–”

“No, I don’t care!”

“Doc, he’s loose!”

“Tough shit! He can get to you in the hospital bed. Lie down and _stay there_.”

Scarlett puffed up her chest. She was the ranking officer in the room, despite Doc’s overwhelming authority as medical officer, and she would not take a command like that lightly when her troops were in trouble.

Doc saw this and pointed a finger at her face. “Lieutenant, I will court-martial you so fast your ponytail will fly. Get back in bed and let active-duty Joes do the job they swore an oath to do. You are on medical leave. You will stay on medical leave until I deem otherwise. That might last a week or it might last a year. Do I make myself clear?”

Duke and Tripwire, cowed, had retreated back to the hallway, closing the door behind them, but she could see their silhouettes in the small glass window, and she could hear Duke continuing to relay the situation as he knew it back to Control. He was probably getting permission to go out on patrol with Wild Bill right now, and she would be left behind.

After a tense moment, her chin high and her gaze steady, she said, “Yes, sir.” Ever the soldier, she would not jeopardize her future with GI Joe for one moment of reckless bravado. Even stubborn Shana O’Hara knew when it was time to quit at the hands of defeat. Hell, she’d been thoroughly beat the day before when she couldn’t save Miller from the unknown man of the unknown organization with the unknown intentions against her and Duke.

“You too, ninja,” said Doc to her back as she was returning to the hospital bed, dragging the IV stand behind her. “You can stay here, fine, but you lie down too. I need to do concussion checks on both of you in a few hours.”

Scarlett settled back on the mattress of the reclining bed, sitting up high and watching as Snake Eyes moved to sit in the cheap armchair on her right. Doc went over to the wheeled medicine cabinet and keyed in the electronic code to unlock the narcotics. Scarlett made a noise of protest.

“Don’t worry. I won’t give you anything to keep you under.”

“No.”

“This is the lightest stuff we have that will keep you from screaming.” He raised a big, thick-tubed syringe and showed it to her, like a waiter holding out a bottle of pinot for her to approve or not. “It’s just enough for the night. I can see you’re still hurting.”

“No,” she muttered as argument, but she had been shivering and sweating and unsteady on her feet when Doc had come in, and only part of it had been fear at her discovery.

He injected it into the port of her IV with a steady, practiced hand. “It will take a few minutes. Snake Eyes, should I bother…?”

The ninja turned his mask towards the doctor, but he didn’t move otherwise, giving the effect of a stern glare. Doc lowered the syringe and rolled his eyes.

“A few centimeters over and this would be a much different story,” he muttered, more to himself than to them. “Scarlett, stay in this bed until morning. I will sitrep you then.”

She nodded at him and watched him close the door. The hospital room was dark again, save for the street light coming in through the window. Snake Eyes was silhouetted by it, rimming his charcoal outfit in gold. She busied herself with getting comfortable, pulling the thin hospital blanket up to her waist, then turned to look at him in the darkness.

“Are you going to stay here all night?” she asked.

He nodded.

“You’re not going to go off and help them find the guys?”

He shook his head.

“Good.” She held out her right hand to him. He took it with his own. She tugged very gently. At that signal, he stood and lowered himself beside her, squeezing in. The rails were down, making it easier, and she scooted over to her side, minding her shoulder injury. When they were done adjusting, Scarlett’s head was nestled in the crook between his ribs and arm, his cheek on her forehead. She listened to his breathing.

The pain medicine Doc had given her was slowly beginning to work. She relaxed for the first time in hours in Snake Eyes’ arms and closed her eyes.

The next morning, she woke quickly but groggily, disoriented by the light streaming into the room and the absence of her partner beside her. She pushed up from the mattress, noticing it had been reclined lower, and saw Doc standing in the open doorway, speaking to two strangers in standard Army fatigues, holding weapons at guard.

He saw her moving and nodded at the soldiers before coming in. “Your vitals look good,” he said, indicating the graphs and charts and beeps coming off all the machines he’d hooked to her again. “You’ll go back to the Pit for rehab today.”

“Have they found anything? Anyone?” she asked, dropping her legs off the edge of the bed and stretching gingerly.

“No,” he sighed, his attentive eyes watching her for signs of pain. “Duke and his team were out most of the night. We haven’t heart a peep on any broadcast signal, either. They’ve gone back underground.”

“Damn.”

He closed the door to her room and helped her to her feet, poking and prodding at her shoulder. She stretched her neck sideways, pulling at the tendons and muscles that led down to the joint, and followed his murmured instructions to move, lift, or bend.

“Can you take off your shirt?”

She struggled with that just as she had getting it on the night before, but eventually she managed it, standing with only the bra and the sling keeping her shoulder down. As he continued the checkup, Scarlett asked, “Who are the pinkies outside?”

“Army sent ‘em to watch now that all of G.I. Joe is out looking. There are three different teams here. Duke, Flint, and Lady Jaye are all heading patrols and searches, and Mainframe and Breaker are looking under every digital nook and cranny they can find.”

“And they’ve really found nothing?” Scarlett couldn’t believe it. She’d come to rely on her electronic wizards doing magic with internet connections and databases that no one else in the world could do with such finesse as those two.

“Nothing so far,” Doc said grimly. “But you know them, they won’t stop working until they pick up some sort of clue, be it a receipt for hot dogs while they waited for you at your place or a check they paid to rent the ranger’s station.”

Scarlett grunted in the affirmative as Doc helped her get her long-sleeved shirt back on. He began unhooking her from the machines, silencing the beeping alarms as they lost their tether to their patient.

“You and I are going with an armed escort straight to the airport. Ace is waiting there to fly us back to the Pit.”

“Right now?”

“ _Right_ now, Lieutenant,” Doc growled. “You can bring anything you can carry with you.”

“My suitcase full of clothes for this trip is in federal custody,” she said, half sardonic and half annoyed. “I’ll settle for tans and greens when I’m back.”

They walked together down the hallway, Doc at her elbow and watching her for signs of weakness or pain. Behind them, the pair of Army grunts followed in a grim, statuesque silence.

When they were in the lobby and Scarlett was signing her discharge papers that Doc had had prepared, she asked, “How is the civ that was with me?”

Doc seemed to hesitate, giving her all the answer that she needed as he finally responded, “Not good. He’s alive, but it’s hard to say how he’ll be tomorrow or the next day.”

Scarlett cursed the Cobra name, a common saying among her GI Joe peers for when anything went wrong, from a clogged pipe in the bathroom to a missed layup in a basketball game in their underground court: “Fuck Cobra.”

“Fuck ‘em, indeed. Let’s get you home.”

Outside in the covered visitor’s bay, a black and white Metro police car was waiting for them with a tall, slightly overweight officer standing at the driver’s door. He looked over at them as they approached and nodded. “Officer Browne, sir and ma’am.”

“We appreciate the lift, Officer,” Doc said, opening the back door and indicating that Scarlett get in. He went around to the other side as the cop got in and started the engine.

“Where did Snake Eyes go?” asked Scarlett as they pulled away from the hospital, leaving behind the dead body of the unknown operative, as well as the brave soul who had tried to defend her from enemies stronger than he’d realized.

“Don’t know. At least he stayed around for the first concussion check in the middle of the night, but he was gone by the time I came in early this morning. You were still asleep. You don’t remember him leaving?”

“No,” she said, looking out the window. “I guess he didn’t want to wake me up.”

More snow had fallen in the night; a powder-light dusting covered the roofs and window sills of the old city. It would be gone by noon, but right now it made the world fairy-tale charming.

Somewhere out there, people were plotting for their deaths.

It took a few minutes, but soon Scarlett was being lulled into a disturbing false sense of security by the warmth of the air in the car and the gentle hum of the tires on the frosty road, by the presence of her friend and ally beside her and the knowledge that several well-trained and deadly-armed people were out looking for the brutes who had struck a blow right at the very heart of GI Joe. She was one of the poster children for the entire organization, and she knew that came with a certain attention. She’d been the only woman on the team of the Springfield Six, and she was young and intelligent and attractive; it was only a matter of time before some nut jobs had wanted to make a name for themselves by going after her. It almost felt inevitable. It was also insulting.

After fifteen minutes on the road and still pumped full of mild narcotics, Scarlett was nearly asleep when, at a red light, the car behind the police cruiser bumped their bumper.

The cop driving them swore loudly and swiveled in his seat to look behind them. He was in the middle of saying, “What kind of idiot-“

Scarlett and Doc both went for the door handles, forgetting that this was a cop car and the doors had to be opened from the outside. “Browne, get us out of here!” Doc shouted as the cop was talking, just as the car behind them revved its engine and slammed them much harder the second time, pushing them into the intersection.

A SUV barreling down at them from the flow of the cross-street traffic crunched into their engine block, spinning them violently. Scarlett protected her skull from smacking the window with her arm as Doc flew into her injured shoulder, producing a scream from the intelligence officer that was audible over the shriek of their tires.

Frightened or confused civilians in the rest of the traffic began to blare their horns as the car that had hit them the first time cut through the trickling stream of cars around the scene of the accident, causing a few more fender benders as it hit the police cruiser once more. Inside, the three occupants were trying to brace themselves in the disabled car, because they knew what was coming.

Several masked men, dressed all in black and carrying very large Cobra blasters, climbed out of both SUVs that had caused the accident and converged on the cop car.


	9. Chapter 9

Inside the damaged vehicle, Scarlett wrestled with the door handle on her right. She could see the men coming at them through the cracked window glass, their figures shattered and advancing brokenly.

On her left, Doc was using his boots to try and kick through the plastic divider that kept the back seat from the front. Officer Browne was keeled over from what looked like a head wound as blood dripped down from his short hair.

“I count six,” Scarlett muttered to her teammate, now resorting to throwing herself at the door. The second hit had crumbled the entire passenger side of the car, making it bend awkwardly in the middle, and had shoved the cruiser aside, giving them only a few feet of clearance between them and the enemy.

“I count three people in deep shit,” grunted Doc, bracing his hands on the roof to better gain traction with his stomping motion. The divider was giving way, faster than she was making headway with the door, so she turned and began to help him, using her flimsy tennis shoes with much less success than Doc’s combat boots. “How’s your shoulder?”

“I might need surgery this time around,” she said through gritted teeth. “Gimme your radio.”

He dug into the pocket of his slacks and handed over the small rectangular device.

The first blaster fire shots burned into her side of the car, startling them. Screams from the civilians who had begun to congregate in the intersection echoed in the chilly early-winter air. Beyond the clogged artery of stopped traffic, she caught a glimpse of two men running towards them with their weapons at the ready. It was the two Army soldiers assigned as protection detail! She’d forgotten that they were tailing them. “Doc, get down!” she cried, as the two brave soldiers began to exchange fire with the masked operatives, turning their attention away from the disabled cruiser.

“Scarlett for APB,” she said into the radio clenched in her fist as she slumped down awkwardly. She waited a second for it to click over and connect to every Joe radio in the world, then continued tightly, “Taking fire, six unknown assailants.”

“What’s your position?” asked a radioman in the control room at the Pit. His voice was calm but terse, and she wondered which of the civilian employees it was, whether she had ever spoken to him before.

“Unknown, follow GPS. We’re trapped in the back of the cruiser we were in.”

The masked men were alternating between shooting at a concentrated area of the car, right at the armored doors, and responding in kind to the other soldiers. It wouldn’t take long for the metal to melt if the operatives were good shots, and she was willing to bet that they were.

“Scarlett, find any cover you can get and stay there,” said the controller. “We have a team coming for you.”

“Just hurry, it’s rush-hour in downtown D.C. and there are civs everywhere.”

“Copy.”

With a cry, Doc broke the plastic divider, his boot rocketing the entire piece out into the cab. It knocked the unconscious officer sideways, who began to stir with a groan.

Scarlett didn’t waste any time in sliding her legs through the opening, shimmying her sore body out and into an awkward squat above the rifle rack in the center console. To her right, the men had taken covering positions in the no man’s land between the cars and were shooting in patterns.

“Scarlett, they’re trying to get us out into the open,” Doc said.

“I know,” she grunted. She shoved the Metro officer sideways into his door and made room for herself, opening his door and letting him drop unceremoniously to the concrete. He landed hard and rolled, half-awake and groggy. She stepped over him, unbalanced and cursing her immobile left arm, and opened Doc’s door as she crouched beneath the window, keeping her head covered.

Doc combat-crawled out. Scarlett unhooked the keys from the officer’s belt as the medical officer began to drag his patient towards the back tire, keeping him as covered as possible, while she unlocked the rifle from the rack and checked it. It was a heavy-duty semiautomatic rifle as per Metro police standards. The slightly-curved magazine was fully-loaded, but she would have to be sparing with her bullets, as she assumed any extra magazines would be in the trunk.

The blaster fire ceased suddenly. The men had obviously seen their escape from the car and were waiting for their next move. The intersection hung with an eerie, Western-style stillness. Scarlett could see civilians taking refuge behind their own cars, peeking out through the windows and above car hoods. Far back in the traffic, angry commuters were blaring their horns, oblivious to the danger.

“What happened?” she muttered, more to herself. Doc was checking on the cop, who was now awake and saying something about a broken leg. He kept trying to sit up, and Doc was wrestling with him, using his bulk and his commanding presence to keep the other man down. The unnatural quiet was unnerving. Had the two other soldiers been hit?

Just like that, like they’d been summoned out of the dreary, overcast clouds, the Joe helicopter broke over the nearest buildings in the horizon and swooped down. Wild Bill was showing off. Scarlett had to bite back a cheer and instead turned that exhilaration inward, racking the rifle and taking a few deep, calming breaths.

Screams alerted her that there was something wrong. She raised her head to look through two sets of shattered bulletproof window glass and saw one of the masked men climbing the SUV’s hood and windshield to stand on the roof. He raised a thick, shoulder-mounted weapon.

“RPG! RPG!” she screamed into the radio in her fist. “Wild Bill, bank, bank, bank!” She tried to aim the rifle and found that her bound shoulder made it impossible, so she snatched the officer’s sidearm from its holster as he muttered and squirmed beneath Doc’s grasp. She aimed and fired off a blasting one-handed shot from the Glock 17, but the powerful kick took its toll on her injured body, and the shot flew wide as the man standing on the car fired his own weapon. She watched helplessly as the grenade left a trail of fire behind it.

Despite her desperate attempt at a warning and Wild Bill’s skill at maneuvering tons of flying metal, the rocketing projectile struck the bottom edge of one side of the huey as the pilot inside tried an unsteady dodge. The helicopter was only feet above the nearest rooftops, and there was no time for the occupants inside to bail out as it crashed in a fire ball that shook the entire block. The people standing around the scene began to push and shove as they clamored to get away from the war zone that had suddenly popped up in the middle of a suburban neighborhood.

Scarlett ducked back behind the cop car and brought the radio up with her stiff arm. The gun was still clenched in her fist. Her palms were sweating. “Wild Bill, copy. Wild Bill, copy.”

The radio crackled with feedback. “Scarlett, what’s the sitrep? We just lost their signal,” said the radioman back at Control.

“Team One is down,” she said, her voice wavering. She hoped they couldn’t hear that twenty-five hundred miles away.

Control did not reply at first. Then: “Copy. We have Team Two en route.”

She covered her eyes with a hand. Doc placed his on her shoulder.

“We have to move to better cover.”

“We can’t leave Browne.”

“I’ll carry him.”

“Ok, I’ll cover you.”

Doc grunted as he hoisted the officer up into his arms in a prepared fireman’s carry. “Nuh-uh. You’re coming with me.”

“They’ll pick us off like deer.”

“We’ll run like hell.”

“Doc-”

“Scarlett, it’s no time to be a hero. We’re both getting out of this, and we’re both going to go get our teammates. We’ll stand for a fight another day. Retreat is out only option until the cyberheads can find out more about them. Know your enemy.”

Sun Tzu. She’d read him in high school. There was another common saying derived from the ancient work on combat: all warfare is based on deception. These men were not who they seemed.

The speech brought that fierce light back into her eyes. “All right,” she affirmed. “But I’m still covering us.”

Doc nodded grimly. “That’s fine. Bring the heat.”

He went first; the officer hung jack-knifed across his massive shoulders. Scarlett stood up immediately, offering herself as the new target in a bait-and-switch to keep their attention off her teammate. The men responded as she knew they would, peppering the wall of the butcher’s store behind her with scorch marks as the unreliable weapons shot wide. She began to run and shoot sideways, knowing she had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually nailing any of them, but the sound of the real bullets seemed to spook the men. They weren’t as brainwashed or well-trained as the Cobra agents of the year past had been. There was a theory within GI Joe that the men who had worked as rogue security-like soldiers for the corporation had been under some sort of mind-control or programming that had made them so blindly loyal to such an obviously evil company. Marlowe and his compatriots had displayed that same sort of unwavering faith in the mission, whatever it was. Perhaps these guys were part of the second wave.

The two Joes planned to try and get away using the alarming number of cars that were now abandoned in the middle of the road, creating hellish traffic chaos on Connecticut Ave. They would duck and run, duck and run, making it down to a side street where they could bunker down while Scarlett relayed their position and tried desperately to make it up to the roofs, where she would have the upper hand in both position and sight-range; she would be able to see the wreckage of the crashed huey up there and could tell the Pit whether there were any survivors. They made it a few long yards with a sort of leapfrog pace, getting behind each new automobile for a few moments while they caught their breath and their bearings, and then were off again and again, creating valuable and life-saving distance between themselves and the bad guys.

Scarlett ran out of bullets from the .9mm but kept the gun, just in case. The rifle was slung uselessly across her back. She would have to switch cargo with Doc, even though it would be literal hell on her shoulder to carry the big policeman. Still, it was her duty, and if she had to go down, she would go down fighting. It was the same sort of resolve she’d felt two nights before, when she’d been tied down and more vulnerable than she’d ever been in her life. It felt good to have that desire to fight back. It felt normal. It also felt like knives were being forced between her ribs. She’d known the possibility for combat and warfare when she’d signed up for the Army. She’d known. If she was going to be completely, nakedly honest with herself, she’d also been excited by the idea of it. Now, though, so many years and so many losses, betrayals, and dirty dealings had left a bad taste in her mouth. She wanted to retire to some sort of private, tropical island with Snake Eyes, living out the remainder of their lives loving each other.

Doc went down hard in front of her, the officer splay-armed and crying out as his leg was jostled. Scarlett landed on one knee, ignored the sharp bite of pain in retort, and dragged both men, one fist each clenching handfuls of scrunched shirt-front, to the final destination of the alley they had picked out. It opened up at an angle to the street so that the bad guys could not see them unless they came closer, exposing themselves to the Joes’ returning fire.

“How bad?” she grunted as she turned her teammate over once they were safe.

He winced and flinched away. “I’m all right, it’s just my back.”

The blaster fire had caught him high in the ribs, just below his right scapula. The fabric of his wool sweater was burned clear away, revealing the wound on his dark skin that was still smoking. The burn looked hideously ugly and was probably just as painful, but nothing was broken and there were no lethal consequences. She remembered the burn on her forearm that she’d gotten several years before from the same weapons. She still had the scar.

“Fuckers,” she snarled. Into her radio she chanted, “Scarlett to all points, we have a soldier down, repeat, at least one soldier down. Possible multiple casualties.”

“Copy that, Scarlett, we’re coming,” came Lady Jaye’s rigid voice. “Hang tight.”

She was leader of Team Two, which meant that either Duke or Flint and their squads had been aboard Wild Bill’s huey. She had to get to them.

“Doc, here.” She handed over the rifle and the empty handgun. Officer Browne was sitting up, shaking his head like a punch-drunk donkey. “I’m going to go above.”

“Be careful,” the medical officer said, taking and racking the rifle with authority. He might be a stubborn doctor, but he was also a soldier who had served more than his share of time in the Army, and he’d at least be able to hold their position now that they were in a slightly more fortified situation.

She gave him the radio and ran to the fire escape that hung on the old red brick of the building that stood on one side of the alley. It felt like centuries ago that she had first met Snake Eyes on a fire escape just like this one. This one did not have the stairs that she remembered from that night, however; it was just a ladder and some landings at both floors of the short, two-story building. She climbed, hand over hand, foot over steady foot, panting at the ache in her arm. She was doing damage, she knew, but it couldn’t be helped. She had to climb.

The wind chill of the cloudy, late-autumn day was noticeably worse when she came out onto the rooftop. She got to her feet and ran to the edge, trying to keep from giving away her position to the men on the street. They had seen the direction of their flight away from the gun fight, but Doc and Scarlett had been sneaky and quick, and the men were now confused and shouting at each other, each one pointing at a different place in the large four-way intersection of the boulevard. There had been no more returning fire from the two other soldiers who had been following them; she was sure they were down, if not worse.

A scrape of a boot on the pitch roof made her turn very fast with fists up, but Snake Eyes was too quick for her even if she’d been at the peak of health and stamina. He came up to her and placed a hand on her forearm, which she appreciated even if she didn’t know the exact meaning behind the action.

“Where’d you come from?” she asked, dizzyingly glad that he was there now. “How did you find us?”

He made a loose C-shape with his hand and cupped it twice around his ear. ‘Radio’. He still had her Joe radio. He’d followed her GPS signal.

“Good,” she said. “Now you’re finally going to carry one. Listen, Joes are down.” She pointed where, at the taller buildings on the diagonally-opposite side of the intersection from where they were now. “There was a crash, and we haven’t heard a thing from their radios. We need to get over there.”

He nodded, and with the split-second understanding of body language that Scarlett had perfected around him, she caught him before he could make his next move and take off in a running leap off the edge. “I said ‘we’. I’m coming too. You have to get me over there too.”

He nodded again without argument. She closed her lips against a relieved sigh, loving the ease of working with him. He wrapped an arm around her torso and hoisted her easily. She let him do all the work; any attempt to help with the process would just get in his way. He knew what he was doing.

Before she could brace herself any further, the ninja threw himself over the edge, back across the alley after a running start across the roof. They fell into the eternal drag of gravity for a split second before he tucked them both into a roll that propelled them over the gap between the buildings. He landed on his feet and rolled once more across the gravel, taking the kinetic energy into his knees and thighs so that he wouldn’t shatter an ankle from the impact. Scarlett flopped alongside him like a limp rag doll, trusting her partner to do it all and better than she could have done.

When they were back the right way up, she sprang to her feet and led the way across, knowing they would have to hopscotch over to the next building one more time before doing a series of leapfrogs across the tops of the abandoned cars in the street. She had spent enough time with Snake Eyes that she could see the path they would take as though it were lit up with reflective tape.

While they were running and jumping, she managed to get a few glances of the men who had attacked them, still standing in the center of the large intersection. They were watching their progress from several tens of yards away, but not firing. It was odd, and it put a sickness in her gut that she couldn’t swallow. There was more coming.

They made it over fairly quickly, but Scarlett ended up out of breath and slow by the time they were climbing up the fire escape. She swore on her mother’s grave that this would be the last time she ever climbed one again as they crested to the roof.

The helicopter was visibly destroyed and still smoking, but there was no fire to spread to the actual building. It had landed almost perfectly on its side and had collapsed from its own weight so that it looked like a dented old soda can someone had crushed under their boot.

The four Joes who had been inside were spread out on the roof; Wild Bill was holding one severely-broken arm in his other hand, elevating it to reduce blood flow leaking from the punctures made by shards of bone piercing his skin. He was reclined against one wall of a service room on top, his hat brim low over his eyes. Tunnel Rat and Duke were working over the body of Tripwire, who was lying gasping and bloody on his back.

Scarlett dashed over, Snake on her heels, and skidded to a stop beside them. “What can we do?” she asked.

“Elevate his feet,” Duke ordered quickly. His hands were soaked in the other Joe’s blood. A sharp, short piece of metal was jutting from the private’s belly. The kid was choking and wheezing, holding tight to Tunnel Rat’s hand as if it were a lifeline in heavy seas.

Snake Eyes took the place at the young corporal’s legs, lifting his feet to help blood flow down and back to his suffocating brain and lungs. Scarlett pressed her hands down hard on Tripwire’s belly, trying to staunch the bleeding.

“Listen, Tormod, you’re going to be fine, all right? Just breathe, buddy,” Duke was muttering soothingly. He too was pressing down on the wound, his fingers spread around the metal shard that was wiggling from the ferocity of Trip’s jerky breathing.

“Joes are coming for you, Trip,” Scarlett chimed in.

“D-Duke, you gotta tell my dad-”

“You’re gonna be fine, Trip, don’t worry.”

“Tell him-”

“It’s okay, Trip,” Tunnel Rat said, squeezing his hand. “We have people coming.”

“We need Doc-”

“He’s bogged down in the alley-”

“Can Snake Eyes get him up here-”

“We’d need covering fire, Doc’s too big to piggyback-”

“We only have one blaster-”

“That’ll be enough if we distract ‘em-”

“Duke, tell him-”

“Don’t worry, Trip-”

“Tell him I l-love him-”

“You can tell him yourself, corporal.”

“Please-”

“Snake Eyes, get down there-”

“Duke-”

“It’ll be okay-”

“No, Duke-”

“Just hang on, Trip-”

Scarlett took her sticky hand away and placed it on Duke’s. He looked up sharply at her and then back at Tripwire’s face, which was soft and motionless. The kid’s eyes were open, staring at the overcast sky.

The sergeant took a great, deep breath and held it, closing his eyes as if he didn’t believe what he was seeing was real. Then he slowly let the air out through his nose, controlled, like it was taking every ounce of self-control not to burst into a terrible storm of wrath and destructive power. When he reopened his eyes, they glittered with wetness as he made eye contact with Scarlett over their young teammate’s body.

“We’ll get them,” she promised him quietly. “It’s not over.”

“No, it’s not,” he rumbled with the terrifying energy of a typhoon ready to break. “Tunnel Rat, get our weapons.”

Wild Bill looked up at Scarlett as she came close to check on him, and they muttered together for a moment while the others salvaged what they could from the wreckage of the helicopter.

“Hang in there, Bill,” she said as she left him nodding and groaning in his spot. She joined the rest and was handed a small blaster that she could operate with her right hand.

“We had two more, those boomers who relieved you,” she said to Duke. “But I think they’re down.”

He nodded, his eyes downcast as he checked his weapon.

Snake Eyes was crouched at the corner beside an air conditioning duct, hidden from view of the enemies in the street. He signed a couple of rapid motions at her, a combination of the ASL they knew and military hand gestures she’d taught him so that the others could understand if they tried really hard to follow along.

“All right,” she said, hunkering down to survey alongside the knee-height balustrade of the flat rooftop. “Five of them remain. Two are stationed in the center, three others are doing what looks like recon, trying to find where Doc and the cop are holed up. The two soldiers are KIA.” Scarlett could see their bodies from her vantage point, lying together like twins with arms and legs crumpled beneath them. They’d managed to take down one of the bad guys, and she would see to it that they were decorated with full honors. She didn’t even know their names.

“Wait!” said Tunnel Rat. He was catty corner to the rest of them, surveying the flow of the civilians who were shouting and retreating away from the embattled square of the streets. “There’s a… it looks like a Humvee… it’s coming up towards the intersection.”

“Friendly?” asked Duke wildly. Joe HQ had not told them they were sending a land unit. Lady Jaye and her team were in another helicopter, flown by her long-time pilot Stalker.

“No,” said Tunnel Rat grimly. “It’s smashing through the cars in the road and almost hitting people… coming up fast… get ready, guys.” He hunchbacked his way back to them, cradling his weapon.

Scarlett could hear it now; the shrieks of tearing, crunching metal were echoing over the ambient sounds of daytime traffic in the suburbs. People were still screaming and yelling, and even more so as the armored vehicle caused destruction in the street. She flexed her fingers over her little blaster.

When she heard the screech of tires coming to a stop, she raised her head to look over the barrier. The Humvee was big like a tank, dwarfing the destroyed police car and the smashed-up SUV the operatives were now congregating around. They seemed energized; this was their backup, and the Joes were greatly outnumbered.

The side door opened outwards, and a tall figure, also in black, anonymous like all the rest, stepped out, holding a megaphone.

“Joes!”

Scarlett’s blood ran cold. “It’s him,” she whispered to her teammates. “That’s the leader who got away.”

Marlowe relished the stage; she’d pegged him as a performer and a ham very early on that night. “My dear Joes! I know you can hear me! My name is Marlowe! I’m sure you know of me! Sweet Scarlett is with you, is she not? It would disappoint me terribly if she wasn’t!”

Scarlett gritted her teeth and lowered her head, feeling the gazes of all three of the men beside her.

“I have someone else to introduce to you! Please, stand up! No weapons, no tricks, I swear on it! Show yourselves!”

Scarlett stood, ignoring the hissing commands of Duke to stay down. “We have to play along,” she muttered to them. “It’s how we win.”

“Ah, my old friend! Welcome, Miss O’Hara! I’m so glad you’re not the worse for wear from our previous encounter!” Marlowe’s voice was thick with manicured honey as he swiveled around to face her, the megaphone still up at his lips. Around him, the masked men had lowered their weapons, true to their boss’ word. Scarlett let her own little blaster hang at her side.

“I can’t say the same about you, Marlowe!” she called as loud as she could down to him.

The man laughed pleasantly into the megaphone. “Such bravado, my goodness. I take it you have teammates with you up there in your little crow’s nest.”

“Not as many as you!”

“Scarlett, what the fuck are you doing?” spat Duke at her feet.

“That’s sad to hear. I actually have one more I need to bring to your attention. I’m sure you’re wondering about the cause of all this, yes? You’d like to get down into the dirtiness of the mystery?”

“I’d like that very much,” she said.

The back door opened, swinging out on opposite hinges. Another man – no, it wasn’t. This one was young. He wasn’t wearing the black outfit and mask of the others. His face was bare. His brown hair was messy. It looked like–

“Duke,” whispered Scarlett hoarsely. “It’s your-”

Duke stood at her side. His weapon lowered. A tear ran down from his eyes and quivered at his chin, highlighting the scar he’d gotten from Cobra Commander during their final battle all those months ago.

“Vince.”


	10. Chapter 10

Scarlett grabbed at her sergeant’s blaster as he brought it up and aimed, screaming, “Let him go, you fucking bastards!” They wrestled for a moment, and it seemed like Duke was getting ready to throw her violently away from him when a sound echoed up from the nearly-empty intersection.

“Stop!”

They stopped. Duke was breathing raggedly, like he’d been injured.

Vince was the one who had spoken. He was standing between Marlowe and the other masked men as if he was in charge, drawing himself up to his full height, his chin raised and his eyes blazing from hatred, visible even so far away up on the roof. He looked older than he had when they’d met that Christmastime back during the year of the Original Joes, but he was still painfully, agonizingly young. The age difference between the two brothers had probably done a lot to tear at the rift between them when Duke had gone AWOL; his parents had simultaneously babied and pushed away the younger Hauser child, leaving that resentment that hadn’t properly healed, even since their absolution. Duke wasn’t much of a homebody anyway, given that he was at the top of a short list of commanding officers of GI Joe proper, and he took his job as seriously as Scarlett herself did. The difference was she didn’t have family, at least in the traditional sense, and so she didn’t have anyone back home who might nurse a secret abandonment when she didn’t come home often enough. Duke didn’t talk much about his family beyond short updates on how his parents were doing when someone asked. He never mentioned Vince. Scarlett wondered darkly if he had known this was coming, this about-face into full villainous territory.

Then she saw his face staring down at his baby brother, and she knew that he was just as blindsided as the rest of them. More, even, since this was his brother who he’d half-raised, who had idolized him and emulated him up until that first day of guilty-until-proven-innocent. He looked as heartbroken as she’d ever seen him, more weary and alone than when he’d had to eulogize Ripcord.

“Vince, what are you doing?” Duke called, finally summoning a soldier’s worth of courage.

“What you are too weak to do, _Conrad_.” Vince spat the words and the name like a venomous snake. The young man seemed to be vibrating with hate; his hands were twitching like he itched to grab a blaster and finish the job right there.

“What are you talking about?”

“The world can’t be saved. You were always so _idealistic_ about being a soldier and saving the people that aren’t grateful or deserving. Guess what, Duke. You failed. The world is shit and everyone knows it. Everyone except your stupid Joes.”

Scarlett had retreated a bit during this exchange; it was between the two brothers, not involving her. She and her other two teammates would let Duke distract the paramilitary while they formulated their own attack plan. Lady Jaye was talking on the Joe radio, obviously planning; she could see Tunnel Rat listening and replying quietly from his place out of sight from the men on the ground. Snake Eyes, too, was listening, eerily still and silent. She knew he was thinking hard, not disturbed or diverted from the mission at Vince’s appearance. He didn’t often let his heart get in the way of his work. He would treat Vince and his team like any other bad guy who they’d come up against. She wondered if she should prevent him from getting too close to the kid himself, just in case the worst should happen, and then she wondered if that wouldn’t just be kinder, to let him die due his own dirty arrogance and spite, and she was sick with herself that she’d even entertained the idea. She was tired of wondering, she was tired of seeing her friends die, and she was tired of being in D.C. She wanted to go home. Home was the Pit and her teammates making boy noises around her and the soothing beeps of Control, where she stood day in and day out, managing her fight and ripe with the authority she’d always known she deserved.

She got Snake Eyes’ attention and made the sign for radio; he tossed it to her with an easy underhand. “Doc, we have Wild Bill with a broken arm coming down to you. Keep him away from the intersection, it’s going to get messy.”

“Copy, Scarlett,” Doc said immediately. He wouldn’t involve himself when there were patients to attend. He would sit snugly holed up in his little alley until Joes came to them.

She glanced over, checking if Wild Bill was wearing his radio over on the other side of the roof, and said into hers so that he could hear, “Wild Bill, get to the fire escape and keep your head low. Doc is gonna get you.”

The pilot make an OK symbol with his uncrushed hand and began to combat crawl, nursing his injury as gingerly as she’d had to with her shoulder. Those painful, terrible few hours seemed like years ago.

“Lady Jaye, what’s your ETA? We’re gonna need you to bring the heat very soon.”

Duke, who had been shouting with Vince back and forth, heard this and jerked. He rounded on her, contorting his face in anger, likely about to start screaming at her instead.

Energy blasts drowned out the sound of Lady Jaye’s reply. Scarlett ducked her head, even though she was as covered as she was going to get, waiting until the volley was done. Beside her, Duke had fallen to his knees, taking refuge behind the balustrade that would do little to conceal his own soldierly bulk. “What the hell do you mean, bring the heat?” he hissed at her, as the red shots of heat and light pealed above them.

“Don’t be stupid,” she snapped at him.

“What did you mean?” he demanded even more aggressively.

Scarlett made a noise of disgust and crawled away from him. Snake Eyes turned his head in greeting when she came close, also hunkered down while the men in the intersection seemed to run an endless supply of Cobra blaster fire.

“I might have to give you a signal when things get extra fucked,” she said to him, trying to keep her voice low. “If I do, you’ll need to incapacitate Duke. Whatever it takes short of brain damage. Are you all right with that?”

He nodded. For once, she could not get a read on him, and supposed that was for the best. She didn’t want to know where he was on the spectrum of delight, dismay, or disgust at the thought of taking their teammate down. She remembered the day he had left them, speeding away on his stolen motorcycle after she and Duke had been trapped in the rockslide. They’d never really talked about that.

Overhead, the energy shots finally died away. “Cowards!” echoed taunting jeers. More than one voice, this time. The rest of the men – Vince’s men, she thought with repulsion – had joined in. “Come out and fight!”

“We’re not doing it,” Duke said to the three of them around him, his big hands nearly bending the metal of his blaster with the force of his grip.

“Duke, we have to engage,” said Tunnel Rat, surprising Scarlett with the vehemence in his voice. “They nearly killed Snake and Scarlett, they _did_ kill Trip, and they’re laying siege to a city. It’s our job-”

“It’s our _job_ to protect people, not start firefights that will get innocent bystanders killed alongside the rest of us.”

“Duke,” stressed Tunnel Rat, disbelief making him whimper like a child, “What the hell are you saying? That we just let them go?”

“No, but…”

Scarlett could see the uncertainty and apprehension in her sergeant’s face. She felt for him, she really did, but enough was enough. “Everybody, on me,” she said, taking control like she should have from the start. It had been a mistake to let Duke talk with his brother for so long. There was a reason hostage negotiators never, ever let the hostage-taker speak to his family during the tense crisis. She wanted to kick herself. For now, she had to assume command. “We’re going down and taking them all. You have permission to shoot to kill, understand? Everyone except Vince,” she said, meeting Duke’s eyes. He’d looked like he was about to punch her until she clarified. She knew Snake Eyes was right next to her, disregarding her orders now for the ones that superseded them all.

Her men, her Joes, nodded and racked their weapons, holding them tight to their chests. Tunnel Rat glanced at Scarlett. She saw the grief in his eyes. This wouldn’t be easy for the both of them, and they both prepared themselves for a long winter in their friendships with Duke.

Scarlett was opening her mouth to issue the order to move out when the peal of energy blasts cracked once again. This time, however, she could not see the red shots flying overhead in a fruitless attempt to get at them where they were crouched. This time, she heard screams, terrible, gut-punching screams that made them all wince instinctually.

“They’re shooting the civilians!” Tunnel Rat cried as he looked down at the street below.

“Let’s go!” Scarlett ordered frantically.

The four of them ran in awkward crouches over to the fire escape and descended it one by one. Scarlett went up and over and down first, but she was slow, making Duke antsy behind her. She snarled in a grimace at the pain her body was going through, but she worked past it, as usual, as she was supposed to, because when they all finally made it to the tumultuous ground of the street, the world was tilt-shifted into a scene from a nightmare.

The SUVs that the men had been driving were smashed beyond repair, but they were serving as excellent cover for them to hide behind and take easy, almost lazy shots out at the people who had congregated in the intersection and the streets that crisscrossed beyond in the fifteen or so minutes since the whole ordeal had begun. The masked men were picking off their targets like they were injured wildlife, the cruelest wanton destructive pleasure Scarlett had ever seen in bad guys.

A new police car had joined the fray sometime while the soldiers had been arguing, though how they hadn’t noticed its arrival, Scarlett would never understand. The two uniformed officers were exchanging fire with the masked men, but their bullets, as piercing and deadly as they were, did not do much to stop them. Scarlett saw one man take a round into his back and continue firing up the street as if he’d barely felt it. They were wearing body armor beneath their black uniforms. Their heads had to have been protected as well, though the masks Marlowe and Spade and the other man Snake had killed had looked like nothing more than wool ski masks with eye slits cut into them. Perhaps this second wave was more prepared to deal with an onslaught of retaliatory weapon play from trained enemies. She raised her small blaster recovered from the smoking wreckage of Wild Bill’s helicopter and fired at the man who had just been shot, hoping against hope that GI Joe’s Cobra weapons could do more damage than police bullets.

They did, but only marginally. Before her eyes, she watched as a young woman who had been running and screaming down through the congregation of abandoned vehicles was struck down flat onto her stomach from a shot to the back from their energy guns just before her own blast caught the man high and knocked him over.

The four Joes took cover behind their own car and crouched together once more, taking stock. From this angle, on one of the four arteries into the intersection, they could see Doc and his two patients hidden behind the wall of the alley across the street. Tunnel Rat made an OK sign at them which Doc mimicked. For now, those three were safe.

“All right, there are seven remaining,” said Scarlett, drawing imaginary points of interest on the car door with one finger, hoping her troops could follow along. “You and you will swoop around the front, drawing their fire and herding people away, while Snake and I will go around back and hopefully get them before they can hurt anyone else. Any questions?”

Duke glared at her mutinously but did not reply. He could see what her orders had done; he would be the bait, too far to engage accurately with any of them, while she and the ninja would be in the action and the ones most likely to claim kills. Duke would not be able to prevent them from hurting, or god forbid, killing his brother from his position. He would, hopefully, be too engrossed in his job of protecting innocents to get in the way of soldier’s justice.

“Ready?” she asked, directly at the sergeant. Tunnel Rat nodded. Duke nodded once. His eyes were bloodshot.

The four Joes stood and opened fire, capturing the attention of the masked men. Duke and Tunnel Rat went around the hood of the car, running and shooting, yelling at the top of their lungs for everyone to give way. Snake Eyes and Scarlett went around the trunk and ducked behind each new car they came to as they got closer and closer. At one point, the closest they had been to the shooters during the whole siege, the two uniformed Metro officers who had joined in spotted them and aimed their own weapons at them. Scarlett raised a hand in mock-surrender, speaking into her radio quickly. A few tense moments passed before the officers lowered their own weapons and went back to the real enemies. Scarlett thanked her radioman controller back at the Pit, who had done a quick exchange with information with dispatchers in D.C. GI Joe tried to keep their operations classified, especially when they were conducting them on American soil, but they had the ability to communicate with the police presence of wherever they were working. Control had long been in contact with D.C. police, telling them the gist of what was happening, letting them know of the US Army presence involved with the incident.

She fired off a quick three-shot blast at the men congregated in the center, taking cover from all sides between their SUVs, and managed to hit two men, who did not seem to get up again. So Cobra weapons were indeed more effective than regular guns, at least against these guys. Duke and Tunnel Rat were making short, skilled work of the people who had stupidly come to see what was happening; she could still hear screams, sirens, car horns, and the crack of shattering glass, metal, and concrete, but she could no longer see easy targets from her vantage point.

“All right,” she muttered to Snake Eyes after rechecking her weapon, her back flush to the cool metal of the car body. “Are you ready?”

The ninja nodded, both katana in his hands.

“Lady Jaye?”

“Half a klick above and in front, Scarlett, we can see you in infrared.”

Scarlett closed her eyes in thanks. “Stalker, lock weapons on the group in the middle.”

“Roger,” said the pilot, Lady Jaye’s longtime colleague and a Joe recruited from her personal vouchsafement.

“Ready and fire.”

“Firing.”

A fiery trail blazed down from the heavens, piercing the cloudcover and aimed straight for the center of the intersection. Scarlett risked a glance upwards to watch it come, at a perfect angle and speed to hit before the men could even attempt to get away. It was a small missile in terms of military might, but it would do damage. She waited until the last moment to watch, needing to know that the shot would prove true, then she grabbed Snake Eyes to her and held him down in preparation for the small explosion.

The ground shook beneath them, but the sound was the worst part, all tearing of metal and asphalt, all screams from the civilians who had not known to prepare. The fireball was miniscule, smaller than a vehicle fire, but it still lit the overcast day with the momentary rush of the destructive power of gunpowder. Then there was the eerie silence of post-missile impact.

Scarlett risked another glance, exposing herself with her gun aimed at the ruined SUVs. A figure further away was running up to the wreckage. It was Duke.

“Sergeant, I order you to stand down!” she shouted into her radio, not bothering to clarify as to who she was screaming at. The Joe radios had been open on all frequencies since the first bump into the police cruiser. She hoped the men listening safe in their bunks at the Pit were having a grand old time.

Duke did not heed her, not that she thought there was any chance he would. With a look at the ninja at her feet that brought him up, Scarlett dashed over too, anticipating any sort of retaliatory fire directed at them, as if some of the masked operatives were cunning enough to play possum long enough to get the Joes close. She dreaded what she would find. Any outcome was unfavorable. She wondered, mentally exhausted from the effort, if Duke would ever forgive her. The uniformed officers joined them, deferring to her and standing around to make a human cordon alongside Tunnel Rat, blocking off the area as fresh waves of fascinated, morbid bystanders trickled back to the area like moths to an explosive flame.

“Vince!” Duke shouted desperately, digging through crumbled boulders of asphalt, throwing bodies out of the way. They had not had eyes on the Hauser brother since leaving the rooftop. It appeared that he had escaped during the chaos.

Every single one of the other masked men identified as enemy combatants was dead or dying, however. Their skin, hair, and clothes smoked with the heat of the blast, and flesh and bone was ripped apart like soft cheese, oozing ash and blood onto the street. Scarlett came close as Duke went to his knees, carelessly throwing his blaster to the ground and grabbing fistfuls of the shirt of the man who looked the least damaged.

“Where’s my brother?” he snarled in the man’s lolling face, ripping his mask off to reveal a thug with a boxer’s nose and cauliflower ears. “Answer me, god damn you!”

Scarlett knew her authority would not be heeded if she told him to back off, which frustrated her. She turned that turmoil to profit when she too knelt and took the shirt front of another man in her hand.

“Marlowe?” she asked quietly. The man raised a trembling hand and pointed with a gloved finger that was missing one full section of knuckle. She dropped the man unceremoniously and followed the line of sight. A man in black, masked and all, had slipped past their unofficial barricade, dragging himself on his belly between the tires of two of the cars that had been parked in a crude circle around their gathering point. Scarlett went to him, but Snake Eyes got there first. He pressed the tip of one of his katana to the man’s spine, between his shoulder blades, and held it there as the man froze and then slowly lifted his hands in surrender.

Scarlett kicked him over onto his back and leaned over, her face in his.

“Miss O’Hara,” he said, silky despite the smoke in the air. “It appears you have won.”

“Not quite,” she said. “Where is Vince Hauser?”

“He’s not in the rubble?” Marlowe asked in mock surprise, infuriating her. “Well, that is a conundrum.”

“Not quite,” she said again. “We’ll find him. I’m just giving you a chance to save your life.”

“I’m in custody now, you can’t actually do anything to me. You’re an honorable soldier, remember?”

“I am,” she agreed, hating it for the first time in her life. “But he’s not.” She let Snake Eyes step into the frame once more, looming over the man on the ground and blocking out any cloudy light coming from above.

She almost wished she could see his face. For once, he had nothing to say in reply.

“When you shoot a gun at a ninja, Marlowe, you should always stop to make sure they’re dead. Otherwise they come back, and they nurse a bit of a grudge.” Scarlett took the man’s shirt front in her fist, just like Duke had done, and dragged his torso close. She could smell the blood and smoke on his clothes, and beneath that, his cologne that had filled her with repulsion that night in the ranger’s station. “I’m giving you one more chance. Where is Vince Hauser?”

“He’s gone,” said the man, his voice ugly and juvenile for the first time since Scarlett had met him. “He saved himself and slipped away in the crowd. We didn’t know what he’d done until we saw the missile coming our way. We knew his presence was keeping us from being hit like that.”

Scarlett felt like she’d been gut-punched, not unlike the torment she’d suffered from this same man only two nights before. The truth, the bare, awful truth, was that she’d ordered Stalker to fire no matter who was standing amongst the men. Vince or no, she had wanted the killing to stop. But the men themselves had thought themselves immune from retribution just because of the kid standing at their side, the kid related to one of their enemy soldiers and the kid who had allegedly organized this whole thing. Why else would Marlowe and his sidekicks have come to her apartment to attempt to lure Duke out into the open? It was well known among the Joes that Duke and Scarlett both rarely left their posts in Nevada, but even Scarlett took vacations to visit her father or her apartment here in D.C now and then. She didn’t even think Duke had his own place anymore, ever since leaving his bunk at the base outside Springfield when they’d become fugitives. Vince had to have known how rare it was to even see Duke anymore. Scarlett had just been the pawn to get Duke to come out of the hidden Joe HQ in the first place. And the men who had signed up with this kid, whatever he’d said or done to ally them to his crazy cause of anarchy, had believed themselves more or less safe. What teammate would order another teammate’s brother’s death?

“ _Oh_ ,” breathed the man. “Oh, you didn’t know, did you, Lieutenant Scarlett? You had no idea Vince was gone.”

She punched him in the face, as hard as her battered and bruised body could handle. It felt good, almost as satisfying as kissing Snake Eyes had been. The man crumbled back to the ground and did not say another word. She stood over his silent body, hoping her punch had killed him, and spat on his mask, right where his mouth was. _How’s that for germs_ , she thought.

Snake Eyes touched her on the arm, getting her attention as she’d been staring down at the featureless shadow of the man’s mask. He asked a quick, double-handed question in sign. She could hear Duke’s heavy footfalls coming up behind them. She answered, “I don’t care,” and walked away from the man she’d left unconscious on the ground.

“Control is organizing the DOJ investigation that’s coming,” Duke said to her, his face calm. “I’ll stay here to supervise, get Tripwire’s body to his family. You should go back to the Pit as soon as you can.”

Scarlett licked her lips, her mouth dry. She wasn’t used to guilt – it was a useless emotion, for the most part – but it grated at her skin now. “I can help,” she started to say, but he held up a hand and shook his head. Despite their ranks, she had practiced deferring to him several times during the Springfield Five, and it didn’t feel as oily as it would have with anyone else.

“You need to heal up. It’s fine. Flint is here to stay, as is Lady Jaye. I have all the help I need.”

She could insist, she knew. He wouldn’t be able to stop her from worming her way into the investigation if she was so inclined. Usually, she would have been, too. This time it didn’t feel right, for more reasons than the obvious one.

Snake Eyes joined her, his katana back in their sheaths on his back. She didn’t ask him what he’d chosen. The ninja signed something else, directing it to Duke.

“I’m sorry about Trip,” she translated automatically.

“Me too. We lost a brother today.”

Scarlett did not appreciate the entendre. She decided then and there that she was done for a while, checked out of soldiering. She’d have to go back to the Pit, of course, but she would stay out of Control for a few weeks. Let others have the reins. Let others make the damnable decisions.

“About your brother-,” she started once again, once again interrupted.

“He’s gone,” Duke said, his face a mask not unlike that of Snake Eyes. “That’s why you ordered the strike, right? You saw him get away.”

Scarlett stared into the man’s blue eyes. It took a millennia to answer, but it was only a breath. “Yes,” she said.

Duke nodded. “All right, then.”

It wasn’t, and it wouldn’t be for a long time. Scarlett slipped her hand into Snake Eyes’. He squeezed at her fingers. She could hear the helicopter hovering just above the clouds, checking out the damage it had done on her watch.

“Come on,” she said to the ninja, tugging him away from the wreckage. “There’s nothing left here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with it, guys! I'll be taking a short break from GI Joe stuff in the coming weeks, but I promise there will be more to come eventually. I have a lot more planned ;)


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